South Africa: Ordeal and Hope
Abrahams, Peter
Peter Abrahams, South African novelist, author of Mine Boy, Tell Freedom, and, most recently, A Wreath for Udomo, was interviewed for DISSENT by Stanley Plastrik during a recent visit to the...
...It did, in a certain time, fulfill man's deepest needs, answer his most profound emotional anxieties...
...Take any African boy...
...It is, I am convinced, going to be the instrument of liberation, ultimately...
...That, I think, would take us up i to two terms of office...
...His education in British Africa and in French Africa has been an edu cation based on British or French mores and values...
...A.: Well, now, what goals do they have in fact...
...Certainly the structure of tribalism isn't going to be completely destroyed or pushed out...
...The uglier features of tribalism, such as the fatalism which says that man really has no choice over what happens to him, that it is all the result of magic and the death that is in the water and all about us and that we might as well resign ourselves to this—the very fact of nationalism, is sweeping that aside...
...subjective...
...Yet you take over much of the old...
...The Africans are a majority...
...At the moment they are negative—almost inevitably...
...He's the guy who should answer...
...A.: Obviously, you haven't read my autobiography.* It's all there...
...The black miner gets something like £60 a year in cash and kind...
...Yes, Africa will be free...
...I should imagine you would do exactly the same...
...This is important in terms of my own people...
...I should say that the essence of this nationalism is self-awareness, self-realization and the desire to have a place in the world that would fulfill the needs of a dignified modern man...
...They are not interested in the future...
...A.: Emotionally it's Africa south of the Sahara...
...In practical, concrete terms you could back the African-Asian bloc on its policy toward South Africa...
...How can they practice racism and at the same time push their economic development...
...Yet, many others are conservative nationalists...
...And the African people, the masses—what does nationalism mean to them...
...The basis of African nationalism is, of course, European nationalism...
...Question: Mr...
...Is it confined to the cities and the intellectuals...
...you know India's record...
...We are the only country South of the Sahara where the sense of nationhood already exists...
...Abrahams now makes his home in England...
...Here he became "the representative of his people" and was treated as such...
...Q.: Are there any other organizations worth mentioning...
...Now we only have negative problems...
...Ideally, I imagine we would all agree that a strong, healthy, industrially efficient Africa would be more desirable than a discontented, miserably poor Africa...
...Ideally, South Africa is going to be a multi-racial society...
...Fairly recently the whites under Alan Paton formed a Liberal Party, a political party which would accept membership without regard to race and color...
...For instance, and it's a tricky one, nationalism in the Union of South Africa has hardly any tribal content at all...
...IV Q.: What organizations exist for South Africans to express themselves...
...uiey had nouming until Western Europeans came with their civilization, including a little packet like the nyurogen bomb...
...Tell Freedom, A. A. Knopf...
...This is a pointer in the wind, an important pointer...
...Example: In the copper belt the Anglo-American Mining Company has found it costly to pay the white miner £100 to £150 a month...
...A.: You know, the old is never completely eliminated...
...The one thing that is clear is that we are determined to be free just as you were determined to be free...
...Q.: When I was last in England I met some people from Johannesburg— radical white students who were sub rosa members of the nationalist movement...
...V Q.: Why do you live in England now...
...The industrialists, the people concerned with industry, have over the years become increasingly aware of the uneconomic character of the industrial color bar...
...A.: The prospects as I see them are not very good...
...The other thing, of course, is that if you operate directly as a political animal, leading a mass movement, or if you are a trade unionist, you obviously can't dd it from afar...
...And then, of course, there will he the greater problems of freedom, the real and creative problems...
...We are a nation there already...
...One of the anomalies of this is the fact that this party is going to stand for Parliamentary elections...
...Now about leadership...
...You notice I said nothing about the abolition of the color bar because, if I am reorganizing society on these terms, the social color bar would collapse...
...Also, the conflict against imperialism is acting as a unifying factor, assaulting tribal exclusiveness, so that in Nigeria, for example, the Ibo, the Yoruba, the Hausa, at a certain level are cooperating and forgetting that "you were my slaves once upon a time...
...Sisulu came back and told what happened...
...They suffer as we have never suffered...
...I think there's an enormous one to make, if we plan correctly now and dream keenly...
...Round about 1939—until that year the Indian organization was mainly in the hands of Indian merchants who conducted their struggle as something completely separate from the Africans—Dr...
...It could be earlier, it could he more hopeful, if those people in the outside world who say they believe in democracy and freedom live by their beliefs...
...Intellectually...
...It costs the country an enormous amount of money...
...recent events north of the Sahara have tended to make for a widening of this orientation, but the emotional attachment is still to the south...
...And for that reason my orientation has been toward a kind of greater-African feeling...
...Q.: You're not afraid of going back...
...The goals are not clearly defined...
...We would, not be able to .go back to the tribal way of holding, but would probably institute a land system by which we could say to all the landless peasants: Look, you can have 5 acres—that'll be the minimum-5 acres to cultivate...
...we are not concerned about the future...
...Africa is on the move and we know it...
...Then we could start thinking of other things...
...A.: Oh, no...
...I think that in South Africa some of our leaders have gone further and have talked about a socialist South Africa...
...he wants to clout right back and he wants to give two or three...
...He said, I didn't stay in the Soviet Union long enough to be able to form an opinion, but in China I stayed there, I got around, I was treated as a person, an interest was shown in conditions of my country, of my people, such as I have not encountered anywhere in the Western world...
...That is as far as African nationalism has really reached...
...It's not a cause and effect relationship, is it...
...Q.: Can you tell us something about African nationalism...
...no different from Hitler's...
...Let's take one example...
...They talk of Kenya as an African state...
...He transmits nationalism down, but it begins with the intellectual, generally in the cities, generally missionary-train' d. What is the nature of this nationalism...
...Now that's a naughty answer...
...When your country is engaged in a war and your leaders sit in councils on the other side, rightly or wrongly, you say those leaders are traitors...
...The worst thing to be in South Africa is a white man who doesn't subscribe to the mores...
...This was something which I would have said was impossible in the African context...
...We shall, I hope, treat the land as a national asset...
...We would also introduce, for a five-year period, seats reserved for the whites, to bridge the gap of hate, so that a minimum number of seats would be there for white representatives whether they get elected or not...
...First of all we would by legislative process introduce, because it is a central emotional point, universal adult suffrage without regard to race or color...
...They also offered the white man a guarantee of job security for quite a long period...
...I go and I come hack so that my view on this...
...You see in South Africa itself the people struggling there have concrete things to do...
...And Moral Re-Armament—that very percinious Buchman ite doctrine—is at work among the African leaders in Central Africa to quite an extent...
...They, in common with the whites, have tended to look down on the natives...
...That is the way they are looking...
...It has possibly some of the most brilliant political theorists in the country in its leadership but has made no impact at all—well, to say not at all would be to go very far—but very little impact on the life and struggle of the African people largely because it has evolved a blanket technique of boycott...
...And yet, in terms of Westernization, a certain attitude has been created in the African mind by the way Westerners, and Western socialists as well, have talked auout this extraordinary thing called Western European civilization...
...In the Union of South Africa, of course, the African National Congress has made pronouncements to the end that it wants a situation in which a man's color would be something completely accidental and ability would be decisive...
...Now, no black can vote in the ordinary Parliamentary elections...
...And if you are opposed to it, there are other people who will offer us the hand of friendship...
...The trying of this Gandhi technique and, 30...
...And so they proposed, making it sound very good, that certain fields should be opened to the more advanced African workers...
...On the other hand, they are extraordinarily constructive...
...Naturally, logically, as it should and would...
...You have a past that you boast about...
...I'm never allowed to stay more than a month but up to last year I could go in and come out...
...Ultimately there is going to be a show down as violent as anything can be...
...in all ways...
...Either that's good or it isn't good...
...We would like to remind you of that...
...Como Kenyatta, the leader of the Kenya Africans, then feels compelled to say: All right, so you have values...
...What comes after the victory of nationalism...
...Will it be laissez-faire, socialism, or the African basis of communal ownership...
...Now let's see, where were we...
...On the other hand, there are individual Communists inside Congress just as there are individual black chauvinists...
...It boycotts everything...
...It is the last great uncommitted continent and it is going to have a tremendous influence on the future shape of the world...
...what's more, its limited success, is something unique in the Union of South Africa...
...A.: As freely as influence and fear of publicity allows one...
...Q.: When you speak of your larger concept of Africa, this subjective concept of Africa, do you include the entire Continent...
...A.: It's a difficult situation...
...What confidence does it have in this search...
...A.: Yes sir, she will...
...I think myself that the next twenty years should see the resolution...
...It's a political trick and, on the face of it, it looks good...
...Africa means to me a challenge and a dream as well as the place where I was born...
...Nationalism was invented not by the Asians or Africans but by the Europeans...
...Now, this is uneconomical...
...Africans are not people who are inclined, like the Indians, to submit to beatings-up because of moral conviction, and non-violent resistance is something unrelated to anything in the African past...
...That's high money even by American standards...
...Q.: Are these white intellectuals...
...This chap looks at the world in which he lives through the new eyes of his Western-oriented education and decides that his status is less than it should be...
...The Rights of Man, habeas corpus, and Western individualism all come in the picture...
...Side by side with this will be agricultural experts, specialists in land conservation, etc...
...Q.: Your land reorganization policy: What will be its political and economic orientation...
...11 Q.: In your opinion, what goals does African nationalism have...
...On the West Coast of Africa, Nkrumah's great dream is a United States of West Africa which would take in Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Gambia, the Cameroons, Liberia—this is his dream...
...This is, of course, one of our very serious internal problems...
...In relation to the rest of the world, the African has been a rather special kind of person...
...He traveled to England, was met by only a few interested individuals, then across to France, again a few interested individuals, then across Europe until he got behind the Iron Curtain...
...As you go over to the West Coast Nkrumah is the most outstanding figure...
...You may say I'm an African nation alist and extremist, but if you can intervene in Korea no amount of smartness is going to convince the Africans that you can't, if so minded, intervene in this case of a manifestly evil regime...
...He will have his security, and his skills, insofar as they exist, will be used for the good of the country...
...Q.: How would you reorganize South Africa...
...They are Cape Colored men and the technique of the boycott means: don't do anything and don't jeopardize your job...
...Some features of tribalism are extraordinarily good...
...That is, if my lifetime goes on to another quarter of a century, which it should...
...In the British set-up, on the other hand, indirect rule—Kenya is a classical example—has been revered...
...It is my opinion that the most sophisticated leadership on the African continent is to be found in the Union of South Africa, and that is logical...
...another 5 acres...
...In any case, the goals aren't clearly defined beyond desiring a democratic South Africa, with minority rights for whites...
...Left wing does not mean Communist...
...In this fashion, I think...
...In Central Africa, African leaders of the new Central African Federation have clearly opted for a multi-racial society...
...It just will...
...But the white miner saw the thin edge of the wedge and so he came back with—and this was the first time this slogan has been raised in multi-racial Africa—"the rate for the job...
...but we have values too...
...Q.: As American democrats and socialists, what should we know, what should we especially know about South Alrtca...
...Q.: But would you want to comment on that...
...Equally fundamental, I would revise the land laws by which 13 per cent of the land can be owned by 10i/2 millions and the other 87 per cent by 21/2 millions...
...i or example, in the eyes of tuie iienya settlers, ttie Kikuyu are a savage, baruaric people...
...The guns are pointed inward...
...good, we have a past too...
...I go back because I must keep touch, because I have things to do, people to see and so on...
...Q.: When and how did you first discover yourself in relation to your people and the struggle for freedom...
...The Youth League is currently the most influential group within Congress...
...This is a psychological point perhaps, but it seems to me tremendously important...
...I have no doubt about it...
...The legacy of injustice logically and naturally will lead to hate...
...Ave seen quite a few of our very best thinkers compelled to uetend a position lacy would not iiormaiiy want to ueienu...
...To be an inter-racial party and support this segregationist parliamentary system is a contradiction which the white liberals have not yet resolved in their own minds...
...A.: The most important is, of course, the African National Congress, our nationalist organization par excellence...
...They now ask him the usual sort of tricky questions...
...They are always seeking out new techniques of fighting...
...No black can be a candidate...
...Of course, we have upwards of half a million Indians...
...Going back is hell...
...The Rhodesian Afri can National Congress has a number of leaders but none has yet emerged very clearly...
...Result: the nationalist struggle in South Africa resembles any nationalist struggle elsewhere in the world...
...In the sense that any man, if he had the choice, would prefer to live in a free society as against an unfree society...
...There are other features such as the attitude to family which, to a large extent, is breaking down in the West...
...Then you have the more moderate wing and a conservative wing...
...Moscow: he was again received as the representative of his people, and so across the Soviet Union to China where he was once more the representative of his people and was accorded the respect that the representative of a great people is entitled to...
...Certainly I myself don't think they'll make any kind of impression on the Africans until their party arrives at a position where it will say that to participate in any way in this kind of thing is to approve it...
...As I understand you, your history, it is revolutionary history...
...It's emotional...
...It is one of those complex things that goes into the making of a man...
...The differences that you find within the British Labor Party, broadly, will be found within the African National Congress...
...In your Western world, less than a person in so many ways...
...But really, second in importance to the African National Congress is the South African Indian Congress, which has just about the finest leadership in the country...
...Whether this anti-imperialism will hold together when the foreign rule is gone, is one of the great problems for those of us concerned with the future of Africa...
...In the case of Kenya tribalism had broken down to the point where it had already gone beyond chieftainship, where you: had rule by a council of elders, by age groups, which was a stage away from the absolute power of the chief and his circle of courtiers...
...In East Africa I should say that the Kikuyu, in the expression of Kenyatta, have talked in terms of "the land is ours...
...It is copyrighted, signed, sealed and delivered by a man who is blond, blue-eycu, me real lvordic type...
...The press in Lon , don now took an interest, negatively...
...Strijdom...
...There's no "romance" about this, no possible change of heart...
...One more thing...
...You know that Gandhi first tried out his technique in South Africa...
...But in order to carry on this policy of indirect rule which, from the British point of view, had the advantage that a very small number of Englishmen controlled a vast area of land, the system of chieftainship among the Kikuyu people was reinstituted where it had already broken down...
...What they would do, the means by which they would conduct the nationalist struggle, is a formally recognized pattern of political activities...
...we are not going to kill the white man, but either he stays on our terms or he gets out...
...The largest police force in the entire African continent is in the Union of South Africa, which also has the biggest army on the continent, and the most efficient and effective air force—and the enemy isn't outside...
...The African leaders sitting in the Kenyan Legislative Council are really compromised in the eyes of Africans...
...Kenyatta finds himself defending and justifying, out of a sense of honor, the old tribalism that in another context he might not quite want to defend and justify...
...In Central Africa the situation is more fluid...
...A.: To this extent only...
...If Anglo-American can get a black miner doing for double what he is getting now, the same job which a white man is doing for this fabulous sum, obviously it would he more profitable to employ the black miner...
...A.: Well, I wouldn't say that I go back with happy feelings...
...A.: Yes, the second organization is the All-African Convention, which is in opposition to Congress and under the leadership of a group of intellectuals in the Cape, with Trotskyist orientation...
...But zee how we really live...
...Q.: The general objective of course being a multi-race...
...The initiative was on the other side...
...you denounce even when you've destroyed...
...Before you became an outsider you were destroyed...
...A.: Well, now, you know that is one you ought to ask Mr...
...This is a beautiful checkmate...
...One of the important differences between Westernism and tribalism is that you didn't have the neurotic in the tribal society because it was so organized that there were no outsiders...
...They've had three hundred years of encounter with this problem...
...Answer: It means the people I know most intimately, the people with whom I grew up...
...For example, in the N. Y. Times recently there was a report that the Negro and white labor pool in South Africa is exhausted and that still further African elements must be brought into the pool...
...A.: Within Congress, of course, you have three wings: first, the left wing led by the Youth League...
...Q.: If I may interrupt, are you freely able to go back whenever you want...
...Nkrumah knows where he's going, and is de termined to get there, but he has some pretty powerful people against him...
...England is still the clearing house of ideas on the whole question of imperialism so that I feel, rightly or wrongly, that I can reach a very, very much wider audience operating from England than I can from South Africa...
...Q.: We like to forget about that...
...He brought the South African Indian Congress into this greater fold which, in the 1939 period, was called the nonEuropean United Front and which today is in effect a committee in which the leaders of the African National Congress, South African Indian Congress and the Colored peoples' organizations work and plan together...
...This is reasonable economics, and at bottom business knows no color or frontier...
...A.: Well, in a sense it is...
...This process of education does, as it were, cut his umbilical cord from the tribal past and creates a new kind of man...
...So that here you have people frankly indifferent to their responsibility toward the future...
...They tried, as you know, a campaign of defiance in 1952...
...A.: All right...
...Every time...
...Some youth festival in Peking invited the Secretary-General of the African National Congress, and Walter Sisulu went...
...We would like to remind you of the Declaration that brought your nation into existence and to give you fair notice that if revolutions were good enough to bring the United States of America into existence we don't see why they shouldn't be good enough to bring freedom to Africa...
...I don't see it that way...
...They therefore encouraged tribalism, treating it as something static, a pattern of culture unlike all other patterns of culture that change and evolve in terms of the needs of people...
...It's one of these matters of thin, linking lines...
...A.: The very first thing you should know is that South Africa stands squarely opposed to everything that makes you democrats and socialists in America...
...One leading white nation alist, when it was suggested to him that "you can't win this thing," declared, "Look, we will win in our time...
...If you are going to give a black this job then give him the same rate of pay you give me...
...So he turns to the larger amorphous mass and says to them, "Look my brothers, this is how a man should live—by Western values...
...They make a track to my home...
...The reason for this is simply that South Africa has not been blessed or cursed, take it any way you like, by the policy of indirect rule...
...Y. M. Dadoo challenged the old Indian leadership and won...
...The South Africa pattern is, for the overwhelming majority of the people, a dictatorship no different from Mussolini's...
...Q.: How do you explain the relationship between the breakup of tribalism and the growth of nationalism...
...The South African Indian, dating hack to the days of Gandhi, has had a long history of political struggle...
...If you produce enough annually, then the land is yours on a sort of freehold basis, a leasehold basis in perpetuity which your son can inherit...
...It was a pattern of culture...
...Q.: Where does democratic South Africa look for allies and friends in the world...
...As you probably know, the policy of divide-and-rule has been so successfully conducted in South Africa that for a very long time the Colored people—that's euphemism for half-castes—have been convinced that one day they will enjoy—I am quoting this, it's the South African expression—the "privilege of having white blood in, their veins...
...Africa is in a hurry going somewhere and we know it...
...It's a particularly difficult one for the white South African student whose views have changed because, when he gets back, he catches hell as nobody else does...
...Leadership in Kenya is based largely on Jomo Kenyatta who is now alone, fenced in and cut off in the Northern territories, and for the moment ineffective...
...A.: In a sense it amounts to escapism...
...You'd have your strike, your boycott and, if it came to violence, you would have railway lines blown up and other things like that...
...The result, as with their sophistication, is that possibly they are too reasonable, not as angry, as extreme as the situation might demand...
...This is seen as something so exclusively West European, and is rammed down African throats to such an extent that, in sneer sell-defense, they react violently to it...
...There you have capital being more "progressive" than your white worker...
...In straightforward political terms we have no choice but to accept aid wherever it comes from...
...Will Africa win freedom in your lifetime...
...Abrahams, what does Africa mean to you...
...As long as you know that it is on your head and that you will reap what you sow, I myself should feel happy...
...If you cope successfully with this piece of land in the first year, you can have another piece...
...A.: I have been on the outside of the Union of South Africa...
...Then—and this is fundamental—I would divert as much money as I could to establish a free and compulsory educational system for all at the primary level...
...There are apparently quite a few of them, as a matter of fact...
...A.: The general objective being a multi-racial society...
...They described life there and then they asked me my opinion: should they go back...
...That is one thing...
...The point is this: "The land is ours and we are going to run it...
...Either you go along with this thing or not...
...These people are armed, prepared and determined, quite ruthlessly, to hold on to what they have at any cost...
...These, it seems to me, are the essential things...
...It isn't perfect, it isn't what many of us would like it to be, but it is the National Congress and it is evolving and growing...
...The assumption behind it is to rule through the established native authority...
...Oh, it's hell...
...for the African this is a war...
...However, recently there has come into existence a Colored people's organization...
...There are no two ways about that...
...The leadership is mainly teachers...
...For instance, they boycotted the campaign of defiance of unjust laws...
...It's a bastardization of both the freehold and the African system...
...A sort of optimism, hopefulness, brotherly love, "Cry the Beloved Country'ism...
...This is the Secretary-General of the African National Congress...
...They must get over this thing...
...But if you are concerned, as I am, with publicizing, writing, trying to interpret, then South Africa becomes terribly confining because there's a curtain between me and the outside world which there isn't in Eng land...
...They are the citified intellectual elite related to the Ashanti— people who could possibly lead, shall we say, the counter-revolution...
...India...
...The Jews were a minority...
...A.: It began among the city intellectuals...
...An African gets a clout...
...There are people who tend to he emotional, sentimental, wishful, all the things we are when we don't want to look something ugly in the face...
...We have to fight our way through the woods to start making a positive contribution to the world...
...In order to make him an efficient operator as an office boy, in the white man's kitchen, in industry, in the mines, you need, to give him a certain modicum of learning...
...Q.: What perspective do you see in the struggle over color in South Africa...
...I mean that for political purposes you denounce...
...Peter Abrahams, South African novelist, author of Mine Boy, Tell Freedom, and, most recently, A Wreath for Udomo, was interviewed for DISSENT by Stanley Plastrik during a recent visit to the United States...
...A.: Oh, no...
...As for what you could do, I can only speak for myself...
...The Indians there have made common cause with the Africans over recent years and have influenced the thinking of the African leader ship quite a bit...
...It has become part of our lives, almost as much as the Indian National Congress became a part of the Indian national life, Q.: Are there different groupings within it...
...100 a month and beautiful houses built for one, and £60 or thereabouts a year in cash and kind for the other...
...I wish you would also touch on the question of the African nationalist leadership...
...It seems to me that the forces of white nationalism are going to fight to the death...
...Nkrumah says self-government...
...I should say that the people of South Africa feel, rightly or wrongly, that their friends are to be found in Asia mainly...
...What would you have said...
...Would there be any new or creative political results arising from the meeting of the old and the new...
...You were born out of the Revolution...
...He refused to talk...
...but we don't quite know where...
...III Q.: How do you explain the contradiction between South Africa's industrial growth, bringing with it the integration of the African worker into the economic life of the country and the doctrine and practice of apartheid...
...The thing is for us not to be drawn into the showdown before we are ready, before we're sure we can win because if this is going to be something we do by ourselves, well, if we don't win, there's going to be an awful period of darkness for the African people in South Africa...
...Q.: But a deserved one...
...After the period of five years, the white South African will be reassured that it doesn't matter a damn whether he is in Parliament or not...
...Q.: Do you see any possibility of a fusion of tribal modes of organization with the imported Western forms of political organization, or is it really a case of one supplanting the other in the course of time...
...On the other hand, one can't say that the Liberians necessarily agree with that dream or that the French West African Negroes would necessarily agree with it, but Nkrumah has an end in view...
Vol. 3 • July 1956 • No. 3
