"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

53
urbanisation. He adds that in the verse of the 1940s to 1960s Europe is seen as bringer
of disease, not of light (xxviii):
Africa can offer no help or encouragement: ‘there is nothing but the forms and
colours’ [Roy Fuller’s ‘The Green Hills of Africa’]. It has no history, no gods, no
sages, no art capable of winning our consent or allegiance. It rejects us. (xxix)
Butler writes that Campbell captures this feeling of rejection in “Rounding the Cape” and
reveals an ambivalent attitude towards Africa which is both “hated and adored” (ibid.)
It seems to me that the white South African poets’ ambivalence towards the
African landscape reflects a struggle to find a sense of place in Africa. Whether
romanticised or starkly portrayed, Africa is not truly home. Smith refers to the “crises of
arbitration between the Africa and Europe within” (81) where the post-Second-World
War, white English poets – Guy Butler, Roy Macnab, Anthony Delius, Charles
Eglington, F.D. Sinclair, F.T. Prince and R.N. Currey – explored Campbell’s Adamastor
motif in ways which reflected this ambivalence.
Smith names Sidney Clouts and Douglas Livingstone as the two most prominent
and outstanding white poets since the 1960s. He claims that both Clouts and Livingstone
concentrate on “the larger text of Africa” (87) and eschew an overt political discourse
(88), while their white contemporaries also seek what Smith calls “a spirit of place” (90).
This apprehension of “a spirit of place” points to a possible reconciliation, a feeling of athomeness
or belonging on the African continent.
Black writers have not had to quest for this sense of belonging but instead have
had to battle to defend their home ground. The late 1800s saw the emergence of the first
black writers to use English. They were the mission school trained writers Sol Plaatje,
J.T. Jabavu, the Dhlomo brothers and A.K. Soga (Smith 39-40). Smith also cites the rise
to power of the National Party in 1948 as a powerful new chapter in South African
English writing where “the major discourse would continue to be the increasingly
complex dialectic of appropriation and resistance” (66). This resistance has led to the
protest poetry of the Soweto poets. This poetry resulted from personal suppression and
imprisonment. In the early 1970s several of these poets (Mongane Wally Serote, James
Matthews, Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali, Arthur Nortje, Mafika Gwala, Sipho Sepamla,
Robert Royston and Barry Feinberg) published collections. A new wave of poetry
followed the Soweto rising of 1976 (Smith 108-112).