"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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(173). Livingstone, too, speaks this “universal” and ecological language where Africa,
for him, is not a colonised continent, but a representative piece of the Earth.
Catching a curved ball: the misinterpretation of Douglas Livingstone’s concerns
Douglas Livingstone was a Darwinian and a Romantic materialist. His critics of the
1970s and 80s mostly did not see this and so offered inadequate interpretations of his
work and concerns. Take, for example, the reaction to Livingstone’s catchword “Polit-
Lit” (1976: 142). Chapman refers to it as disparaging (1984: 94), scornful (1996: 341)
and derisive (2002: xxiii) and Dirk Klopper as scathing (1990: 289). While not wishing to
focus on the fray, I must protest that “‘Africa Within Us’……?”, in which the word Polit-
Lit appears, is not disparaging. There is certainly a tone of playful parody: “Polit-Lit does
have one important function of course: to show the few readers interested that One’s
Heart Is In The Right Place” (1976: 142). However, the main focus of Livingstone’s
article is a carefully argued plea for ecological sensibility and brotherhood. He opens by
stating that (as Brecht had it) modern literature has not changed the heart of even one
politician and that his own political poems “were complete disasters – bad poetry” and
hence not publishable (1976: 142). Livingstone then describes the functioning of the cell
and the biological process and uses this as an ecological metaphor:
Each of us is a walking universe of completely disparate worlds, continents and
seas, with immense and differing populations, all organized together into some
sort of functioning coherence with the single inherent determination (if we are
sane) to preserve life and what is left of our planet. (143)
He ends the paper with poetic descriptions of the richness of South African life, followed
by allusions to a shared humanity, the South African apartheid system of the time, and
the miracle of the evolution of the human race. His final words are:
I feel in all humility we can but find this and much more to confess or celebrate
within ourselves; discovering in the process the miracle against which no wall nor
law or barbed-wire can ever prevail: our uncommon humanity. (144)
The phrase “uncommon humanity” refers to the singular miracle of the evolution of the
human species. Livingstone argues, then, that politics pales into insignificance when
measured against the miracle of life. Dirk Klopper reads the article quite differently. He
argues convolutedly that:
In his article ‘”Africa within us”…….?’ (1976), Livingstone uses science to
counter political conceptions of literature. His parodic style is clever, subversive