Frame
To be or not to be: No
longer at ease1
Arts & Humanities in Higher Education
2016, Vol. 15(1) 15–28
! The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/1474022215613610
ahh.sagepub.com
Njabulo S Ndebele
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Abstract
This essay examines the changing range of descriptors available for black South African
experience from the 1960s through to the present and shows the changing implications
of ‘black’, ‘African’, ‘citizen’ and ‘human being’, with particular reference to the formative structures of education, and the enabling (or disabling) effects of literary studies in
their Eurocentric and Afrocentric forms. In a general continental context in which the
post-colony replicates the oppressive structures of the extractive instrumentalization of
colonialism, it argues that emphasis is now best placed on ideas of the human being and
citizen.
Keywords
African, African writer series, eurocentrism, literature, South African
As a young adult and well into my adulthood, I often felt uneasy about my place in
the world. The descriptors ‘Black’ or ‘African’ to which I often had to respond were
mostly the cause of my anguish. I became aware of the first descriptor before the
second one. They shaped who I thought I was and how I was to respond to my
immediate surroundings and to distant worlds.
In 1994, when South Africa became a free and democratic country, I responded
to a third descriptor: ‘citizen’. Twenty years later, I feel the urgency of a fourth
descriptor: ‘human being’. This last one had always been there. But sometimes
I sensed uneasiness about it. It was too general and did not typify sufficiently.
It was more comfortable to be ‘black’. In the 1960s and 1970s, a period of assertive,
activist, self-affirmation, ‘black’ rang wonderfully in the company of ‘and beautiful’.
In the 1980s, the descriptors seemed to fall off the radar screen somewhat. The
intensification of the struggle to overthrow apartheid and the brutal response of the
increasingly cornered state seemed to get us to focus less on identity than on getting
Corresponding author:
Njabulo S Ndebele, Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, Department of Social Anthropology, Arts
Block University of Cape Town P/B Rondebosch 7700 Cape Town South Africa.
Email: [email protected]
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done the job of bringing down a hated state. Around that time another descriptor
crept in: ‘comrade’. I struggled to connect emotionally with this one although I
admired intellectually and politically the Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions
that gave life to it. But it remained too distant for me. Then in 1994, Thabo Mbeki
declared: I am an African!
All these descriptors now come across as markers in a long journey. If the first
two descriptors ‘black’ and ‘African’ were its beginning, then ‘citizen’ and ‘human
being’ are its completion. It is this moment of completion that is the context of my
reflections at this 40th annual conference of the African Literature Association on
the theme ‘Texts, Modes and Repertoires of Living In and Beyond the Shadows of
Apartheid’. But completions always imply other beginnings and new questions:
What needs to begin or has begun, and by whom?
A book to be launched at this conference, Chinua Achebe: Tributes and
Reflections contains a chapter I wrote (Ndebele, 2014). It is one among other
tributes to Chinua Achebe. In it I reflect on my intimate journey with one of his
novels. I work with the metaphor of a flood of world history bearing me downstream. Although there is the real danger that I could drown, I really don’t. I am
constantly testing the pressure of the flood, seeking to gain some control. With my
legs and feet stretched out to the full length of me, my big toes are my sensory
feelers. I need to secure a foothold. I find one. It is a novel. A wonderful foothold in
the river of my time!
Then a remarkable thing occurs. Where I stand I am astride the mouth of a
spring. Bubbling out of the spring are more novels, and poems, and plays, and
expository prose, and films together with all those artists who created them, many
of whom have contributed tributes to Chinua Achebe in a publication that brings
alive a treasured moment in the history of African literature.
So I tell a personal story about a novel and me. Between us, the novel and I, is a
world of my growing up as a boy. A key part of that growth was the expansion of
my awareness. A significant moment in that expansion as I reached out towards a
broader world was when this novel came into my life. Since then my relationship
with the world grew so complex I hesitate to even begin to describe and contemplate it.
So what could be the connection between a novel and the sweep of global history, and a young man in between, who grew into adulthood? Frighteningly tenuous though such connection might be, it is worth trying to give expository shape to
intuitions of it. These are intuitions of the same kind as those that have from time
to time urged me to sit down and write something. I feel certain that all of us in
here have famously struggled with the tough flimsiness of the spider’s web ‘between
the idea, and the reality; between the motion and the act’ and ‘the shadow’ that
‘falls’ on the liminal gap.2 Here now is my shadow.
I was 21 years old when No Longer at Ease came into my life. When it did, I had
to let it in. The book was on the common first year literature syllabus in the
Department of English at the then University of Botswana, Lesotho, and
Swaziland at Roma, in Lesotho. I remember some of the others: Juno and the
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Paycock; Of Mice and Men; A Streetcar Named Desire; Sons and Lovers and The
Lion and the Jewel. No Longer at Ease trumped them all, with The Lion and the
Jewel a close second.
Up to that point, as far as I can remember, except for two novels in isiZulu, one
of which, Mntanami! Mntanami! by Sibusiso Nyembezi (1969), and some short
stories in isiZulu readers at primary school, the rest of my reading went by the
elegant name of ‘literature’, associated with books in English from England and
further away in America. No Longer at Ease broke this association unexpectedly
and radically for a boy from a township in Nigel, about an hour’s drive East of
here.
This was against the background that for the overwhelming part of my formative teenage years the western, particularly English, literary imagination constituted
the central part of permitted, formal, official schooling. I and my generation were
without choice educated in a schooling environment that in its content orientated
us away intellectually from our formative environments of home and community.
Moral and ethical lessons were distilled from biblical stories distant in time and
place and applied judgmentally to our immediate world without the mitigating
intricacies of specificity. Sermons on Sunday often sealed the deal. Cursed be the
men who wore dresses, and women who wore trousers in the anarchic festivities of
the township on Christmas day!
The specificities of township life as content for serious contemplation of ethical
and moral choices were never a part of formal learning. Instead, a displacement
occurred.
People in my community did things to one another. We noted them in casual, if
concerned, strained and anxious conversation. Some had been arrested for theft,
physical assault, murder and sometimes politics. Some people took their lives.
I remember the boy from across our school who threw himself from a bridge to
be run over by a passenger train hauled by a steam locomotive. For a while, suicide
was a subject of social conversation throughout the township, but never once in the
school classroom.
No way could I have shared in a classroom moment about life and the taking of
it, and that I was on that train; that it stopped; that we got off in the middle of corn
fields to see the train drivers poking underneath with a long flexible wire to disentangle severed legs from metal; and that between the rails under the locomotive
I saw an empty faceless skull that looked unbelievably dry and whitish like a
pumpkin drinking gourd.
But the official effects of all such harmful things that people will do to one
another were assured. Imprisonment will follow.
The irony of it all was that especially at secondary and high school, we did
contemplate the mysteries of falling in love especially across social class; the amazing intelligence of criminal minds and their tortured souls, and wondered whatever
it was that drove them to their brutal actions. We had those moments officially at
school. But the subjects of our contemplations were other people’s murderers, in
London; star crossed lovers in Verona; political plots and assassinations in Rome;
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revolutions in France; the antics of birds, dogs, cats and parrots as pets in Greece;
and of great white missionaries in Africa.
What we did not read about the United States we saw in numerous films: the
lone heroes of the western movies, tackling unjust land barons; the atrocities of
war, and human triumphs despite; classroom dramas in working class communities, pitting dedicated teachers against irrepressible adolescent impulses; gripping
courtroom battles and romances tested through bruising disappointments and
crushing betrayals.
We, the little ones at primary and secondary school, were transported through
poems, novels, films, comic books, to worlds thousands of miles away. In time, the
more our imaginations recreated those distant world into compelling reality, the
less real our own immediate world became. As we progressively disengaged from it
emotionally and imaginatively, it became less authentic, less accommodative, less
attractive, unfulfilling and often hostile, even as we lived in it. We lived in it without
the concomitant, learned habit of thinking it. Our affective imaginations progressively got anchored elsewhere.
People, landscapes and cityscapes thousands of miles away became idealized.
The more idealized they became, the more they induced in us desires focused far
from the surrounding reality of the township and its twin town a few miles away.
So, all that was affectively close to me, which could shape my ethical and moral
attitudes towards pain and pleasure, life and death, desire and revulsion, was never
a part of learning in the world of official schooling. Nothing in my schools ever
taught me about life in the township in any sustained manner. There were few
opportunities to contemplate human behaviour such as would enhance the sense
of human value and deepen subjectivity through informed rational discourse.
It dawned on me that contemplated encounters with my immediate environment
in its own settings had no institutional affirmations.
Although my generation and I may have had little choice in the trajectory of our
education, we were like other children the world. The lack of choice I speak of is
not that in the realm of personal choice, but in history. But even the compulsions of
history are never total in their effects. What I could not get at school I found in the
informal curiosities of childhood in my own home. Without any external prompting, I discovered the exhilarating connection between my mind, my imagination
and the immediate, familiar social, cultural and political surroundings of my
upbringing as a boy.
There were many reading moments in my home. Magazines lying about in called
out to be paged through. There was music that created and fed a taste eclectic to
this day; 78, 45 and 33.3 speed vinyl records of township music, jazz and classical
music were a part of my upbringing. Three of Gerald Sekoto’s painting hung on
our walls as daily but uncontemplated presence, until I saw others of Sekoto’s
paintings in a lying-about magazine awakening a connection of some significance
between my home and the world beyond.
Beyond my home at an Anglican boarding school for boys in Swaziland my
sense of the world expanded in unexpected ways in the early 1960s.
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It was also around that time that I saw a picture of Nelson Mandela with
Ahmed Ben Bella, President of newly independent, revolutionary Algeria.3
It could have been from Newsweek or Time Magazine but it did its rounds
among us. Few things extended my view of the world beyond South Africa than
that picture. Many years in the 1980s I would remember that picture when I first
watched the movie The Battle of Algiers. The painful yet heroic history recalled by
that movie provided a world of context to a single picture of Ben Bella with
Mandela. A memory circle closed.
There was another more immediate, more personal context to that picture.
It underscored the broader meaning of the presence of Nelson Mandela’s and
Walter Sisulu’s sons at my school. Our parents sent us all to Swaziland probably
for the same reason: to escape from Bantu Education, the system of education in
South Africa designed by white people for the black people they oppressed. There
was something affirming about the extraordinary, global resonance of the Mandela
and Sisulu names and the ordinary proximity of their sons to me and other boys at
school. It gave the sense that at school we were sons of our mothers and fathers,
known and unknown, who made similar decisions for us to be there. History felt
both awesomely remote and casually accessible.
There was a great deal of this kind of ambling, casual, un-reading reading and
un-listening listening, this seeing un-seeing that countered or augmented, in informal yet formative ways, over time the prescribed reading of the primary and
secondary school curriculum in South Africa and then Swaziland, where
I matriculated.
Then in the first of my two gap years, I discovered banned books hidden in a
wooden box in my father’s garage. What an exhilarating shock! I had read about
banned books and, and there they were, as I recognized some titles in the box that
were on the censor’s list. There are few pleasures to beat illegal reading. It must
have something to do with the pleasure of holding a secret not to be divulged even
to my father. And then to feel its significance grow as it held me to a silence of
trustworthiness.4
By the second half of 1969 when ‘Obi Okonkwo and his girl friend Clara,
knocked on the door of my awareness with the full reality of their imaginary
lives’ I was ready for them . . . Thus it came to be that I read and studied
Achebe’s No Longer at Ease in the formal setting of a university syllabus in
Lesotho. I found formal affirmation when and where I least expected it. A connection between my personal, social and school lives the necessity of which I only
intuited suddenly occurred. Required formal reading and study in a formal setting
suddenly supported the world of my own informal discoveries of myself and the
world beyond. The impact of my informal literary experiences of earlier years
began to assume a presence, validity and a high degree of ascendency in my intellectual growth. It was a stimulating and exhilarating confluence.
No Longer at Ease was the first full-length novel I read, which was written in
English, by an African writer. It was my first sustained entry in English into an
engrossingly imagined African world. It drew me in immediately with an intense
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imaginative intimacy such as I had never experienced before. My first literary lover,
as I call it, No Longer at Ease, embraced me with firm, warm arms. My own arms
around her would tighten without let to this day.
There was something in the reading of No Longer at Ease that was different from
my secret reading of the autobiographies of Mphahlele, Hutchinson, Modisane and
Nkrumah. While the novel shared with the autobiographies an embracing sense
of authenticity, the impact of its imaginative world worked without the kind
of expository intent one senses running through the recalled and recreated life of
autobiography.
In No Longer at Ease, the drift of the world and some of its insidious moments
came across in subtle ways. In the very first page of my treasured copy that cost me
60 South African cents in 1969 is an almost throwaway reference to ‘Some Civil
Servants’ in Lagos who ‘paid as much as ten shillings and sixpence to obtain a
doctor’s certificate of illness for the day’ so as not to miss the case of Obi Okonkwo
on trial for corruption. How many of these equally corrupt (including their complicit doctors), were there in court to witness a trial in which their very own conduct
was under scrutiny and that they seemed unaware of the irony in which they too
were on trial, and that their own behaviour was as reprehensible as the accused’s
whose public disrobing they had come to witness, and perhaps enjoy?
I remember the assignment topic:
Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly for ever. Conventional tragedy is
too easy. The hero dies and we feel a purging of the emotions. A real tragedy takes
place in a corner, in an untidy spot, to quote W.H. Auden. The rest of the world is
unaware of it. (Achebe, 1963: 36). ‘Discuss’.
Obi Okonkwo’s perspective on tragedy may underscore the aesthetic conception of
the novel that tells his story. In No Longer at Ease, Achebe created a world without
postured messages of self-justification, self-proclamation or censure and reproach.
Instead, it had something far more elemental in its social wisdom. He portrayed a
self-validating, self-referential world with its strengths and foibles at a level of
literary rendering I had not experienced before. Here was a world in which I felt
I did not have to justify living in it, nor did I feel any pressure to abandon it for
other worlds whose power over me demanded that I aspire towards them, away
from my own. I belonged to Obi Okonkwo’s Umuofia, to his Lagos and its Ikoyi
and to Clara’s Yaba. And it was not a romantic world, as Obi’s ‘mummy wagon’
journey to Umuofia depicted. It could be as hilarious as it could be sad (Achebe,
1963: 38–39).
The imagined world of No Longer at Ease whirled on its own orbit in a vast
universe. With cosmic indifference, that universe exerts influence on the human
moral or ethical order. In that universe human beings are doomed to create ethical
and moral markers with which to sustain their own order as well as navigate within
it. Human beings have a large measure of responsibility for worlds they create.
Within such responsibility, they take decisions that make or undo them.
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So what could have happened if the world of my informal learning had been a part
of my formal learning? The question is speculative in a redundant kind of way. I and
my peers belonged to a subject people. Books written by subject people, and who
expressed a message different from official messages, were banned. So were those of
writers among the ruling population who empathized with the plight of vassals.
In Lesotho, it did not take me long to realize that colonial vassals in other parts
of the Africa and its diaspora were telling their stories through books that were
banned in South Africa. Lesotho exposed me to more of them. They are the ones
that bubbled from an underground spring to steady the flood that carried me.
Perhaps one day there will be enough of them to slow down the river, so that we
could contemplate it more. But there is no doubt that they have become a significant part of the global river of the world’s literature.
I am led to think that the full impact of education, public or private, can never
be fully planned. Basic conditions do need to be carefully laid. They are vital.
Laying such conditions for the young of a nation is a huge foundational step in
their growth and nurturing. It must enjoy the most intelligent, rigorous and caring
policies that any country can develop and implement. Such a planned foundational
environment increases opportunities for unplanned casual encounters with educative moments in the broader social realm.
Young people ought to be stimulated to learn everywhere. Education then
ceases to be only about school and university campuses. It becomes an experience
of encounters with echoes of learning that go in both directions between the formal
and the informal. The import of this understanding is that up to the time that
I registered as a first year student at the then University of Botswana, Lesotho, and
Swaziland at the Roma campus in Lesotho, I had learned on my own far more
about my immediate world than five years of a formal curriculum at boarding
school in Swaziland.
Then no African child will have to wait until they are 21 years to commune with
their world. A great deal of education in society takes place outside of the planned,
policy driven environments of formal education. This means that the fullest impact
of education, public or private, depends on the extent to which formal affirmation
through institutional support is accorded to the universal context of learning that is
always happening in diverse informal ways in the broad society. The implication
that for South Africa in the last 20 years, and for much of Africa between the 1960s
and the 1980s, life in the nooks and crannies of society, in its emotions in millions
of beating hearts and thinking minds, had few formal institutional affirmations.
Conceptual life, an inseparable part of social growth, is particularly shaped in
institutionalized settings.
But the choices to be made depend on the kind of society we consciously envision against realities imposed from the past that may have become inseparable
from our impressions of the normal. Change then has to be pursued selfconsciously, consistently and persistently. Why was it difficult for much of Africa
in the 1970s and the 1980s to achieve this kind of commitment? South Africa, best
positioned to achieve it, seems to be faltering 20 years into its liberation.
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I think it has something to do with Obi Okonkwo’s notions of the ‘Augean
stable’. ‘Where does one begin?’ he mused.
With the masses? Educate the masses? Not a chance there. It would take centuries.
A handful of men at the top. Or even one man with vision – an enlightened dictator.
People are scared of the word nowadays. But what kind of democracy can exist side by
side with so much corruption and ignorance? Perhaps a half-way house – a sort of
compromise. When Obi’s reasoning reached this point he reminded himself that
England had been as corrupt not so very long ago. He was not really in the mood
for consecutive reasoning. His mind was impatient to roam in more pleasant
landscape.
Obi Okonkwo in his rather inchoate manner leans towards impatience of the kind
that would shape political behaviour in the post-colony.
Military coups and nationalization of strategic assets that swept across the continent like a tidal wave became a part of the definition of the post-colony as a
replica of the colony that set its foundational character. It continued to be an
extractive instrument orientated away from the potential of its own prosperity.
Seeking to make the new African state stronger, they only weakened it. A desire
to acquire traction through a highly centralized state led to the tendency to miss the
vital middle point between a current sense of malaise and the end point of aspiration. There was hell and heaven, and no life to live and contemplate in between.
In this, Africa sought to emulate and reproduce the effects of imperial energy
at the point of its subjugating impact than at its enabling source in the colonizing
country itself. The external imperial design singularly focused in its extractive
intentions was a function of diverse economic, cultural, social and political
environment at home. It is this diversity that fed a singularity of purpose away
from home.
In its rampant extractive intent the colonial order made few distinctions between
the human and non-human at the colony. The human was as instrumentalized as
the non-human. Both were resources to be exploited according to their usefulness.
It is not surprising then that the military coup as a mechanism to secure power
placed an inherently coercive instrument at the apex of control over an extractive
system. This was so even where such coups, as Sankara’s of Burkina Faso, were
driven by a radical intention to empower the mass population. The resulting
structure of governance was inherently constrictive and extractive even when it
sought to achieve expansive and inclusive effects. Any subversive project had to
find ways to redesign an extractive system with its institutions in order to move
beyond it and to re-orientate it towards an inclusive order.
Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson’s recent book Why Nations Fail (2012)
gave to my thinking about the condition of the African state, a depth of resonance
that struck like an epiphany. This magisterial work is impossible to summarize, so
I will borrow from the authors. The ‘solution to the economic and political failure
of nations today’, they say ‘is to transform their extractive institutions towards
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inclusive ones’ (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012: 402). This is an assertion they earn
through years of research and scholarship that covers all continents. The general
failure of much of post-colonial Africa to achieve economic and social prosperity
continues. Post-apartheid South Africa is showing signs of being a strong contender in that direction.
The South African economy is historically founded on high extraction of its
human and non-human assets, to achieve extraordinarily high yield and pitifully
low incentives and low rewards for its captive labour. This structure of extraction
has remained fundamentally intact 20 years after freedom. The killings of protesting miners at Marikana two years ago underscore that historic fact. South Africans
through their government appear to be withdrawing from a politics that sought to
design institutions that would terminate an extractive economy in favour of an
inclusive one.
Africa needs to restore the vital sense of its diversity, human and non-human, as
a fundamental attribute of source of it’s being in the universe, and then to turn that
diversity into a source for fresh social, political and economic visions.
In 2014, I look at where Africa is today, and at my own country South Africa.
I am struck by two historic trends. One is the historical moment that produced the
African writers and their world that I encountered in my undergraduate days, and
how the curriculum at the university validated my sense of an African arrival in my
own life. I do not have the sense that kind formative moment and its intended
effects lasted long. The historic FESTAC ‘77 in Nigeria seemed to mark the apex of
that period. What characterized it for me was the congruence of political and
cultural resurgence. In retrospect, both were evocative. They were acts of selfassertion, evoking a future. But the future required a self-conscious and purposeful
present, continuously rigorous in its intent.
The second trend is the period in South Africa just before freedom in 1994.
It flourished in the 1970s the 1980s. Projects such as the history workshop at the
University of the Witwatersrand sought to produce new knowledge particularly of
suppressed histories. A new democracy would have new knowledge to work with
that came out of rigorous, resuscitative research.
Around that time, books from the African Writers Series began to be available
in South Africa at the same time as many of the titles in my father’s wooden box of
banned books were unbanned. The canon of English literature was fiercely challenged at the time of the Black Consciousness Movement. Departments of English
in South African universities were challenged to review the shape and character of
their curricula and syllabi. This debate, which had been raging in the late 60 s and
70 s in other parts of Africa came rather late to South Africa. The long term
objective was that it would not take 21 years before a young African could read
and study an African novel. Eventually, South Africa got free and one more constitution in Africa was added to the history of continental aspiration.
Twenty years later after 1994, that nascent, creative energy does not appear to
have been sustained and embedded in national life. Departments of English that
were under a pre-1994 siege appear to have relapsed into a conservatism that
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reproduces itself from an accumulated dominance of the English canon in a state
still overwhelmingly extractive.
That an extractive order and its concomitant institutions would have severe
implications for the ethical and moral character of the post-colony and the postapartheid states is not difficult to anticipate. The equality of instrumentality
between the human and the non-human would highly likely define the attitude
of the new leaders towards their own people. They inherited a humanity structurally and ethically located above that of their people.
The resulting low sensitivity levels in public life can be gleaned from the harsh
laws being passed in several African countries to punish disapproved sexual orientations. The disposition towards repression and punishment is antithetical to the
corrective potential of tolerant diversity.
These were Obi Okonkwo’s ‘handful of men at the top working for their own
enrichment. They were at the apex of the extractive hierarchy of countries with
limited and diminishing state capability. The deterioration of public systems, in
addition to government as the major source of employment, resulted in economic
and social order of severely restricted diversity.
The impact of this situation on public life in the African state foregrounds a
critical issue of contemporary significance that is worth pondering. David Kaiza a
Ugandan writer and journalist reflects on the historical impact of the African
Writers Series. He does this in an article (Kaiza, 2011). Kaiza takes us to a scene
in No Longer at Ease where Obi Okonkwo and his father are discussing Obi’s
intention to marry Clara.
You cannot marry the girl.
Eh?
I said you cannot marry the girl.
But why, father?
Why? I shall tell you why. But first tell me this. Did you first find out or try to find out
anything about this girl?
Yes.
What did you find out?
Whatever it was that Obi found out did not satisfy his father. ‘My son . . . I understand what you say. But this thing is deeper than you think’. To which Obi also
vaguely responds: ‘In ten years things will be quite different’.
From his discussion of this scene, Kaiza argues that it typifies a defining theme
in the canon of the African Writers Series. ‘Should one require a précis of Africa’s
literature from the 1960s’, he writes,
this passage offers all the elements: Obi as Ocol, Obi as Egbo of the smart set of Wole
Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965); the type populating that cache of books like spawn
stranded outside the moist pool of time. Read No Longer at Ease and you have nearly
covered the African Writers Series (AWS) syllabus (Kaiza, 2011: 90).
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Kaiza deploys this perspective in order to make a strong call. For too long, he says,
Africans have been ‘no longer at ease’. The bulk of their literature has captured
powerfully the phase of being ‘no longer being at ease’ and rendered an invaluable
service to the continent. But Kaiza grew uneasy with what, as I understand him,
he began to sense as a one-dimensional characterization of Africa. What captured
an era transformed into a defining and unchanging characteristic of a continental
condition across eras. ‘For my generation of writers, those born in the 1970s’,
he says,
the AWS was classroom text. To know how to really write, we naturally turned to the
American stylists. To know about human nature, we turned to the Russians and the
Japanese. It was the order of things. Ngugi might teach you how to feel, from Achebe
you learned how to integrate African ideas into your writing, and Okot p’Bitek taught
you how to sound authentic. But you also needed to be wary of these subjects. (Kaiza,
2011: 102).
I read Kaiza to be saying that the continuing dominance of the perception of
Africa’s unease, appropriate to the times in which this theme was explored,
might perpetuate the status of its people as perpetually modernizing, always
becoming something else, sometimes to be admired by those who saw such modernizing as justification for their civilizing mission, who proclaim the progress of
Africa, and even declaring the 21st-century as Africa’s century. The social and
political dynamism of the decolonization may have become anthropologically
fixed and unchanging.
It is worse if the ever-progressing African does so in national environments still
shaped by deeply extractive economic and social conditions that reproduce poverty
at the same time that progress is proclaimed. The progress thus proclaimed risks
being illusory within the confines of public spaces restricted in diversity of interest.
They are in a state of stasis in which they are always becoming. A devastating
paradox! If Africans are always becoming when will they ever be?
I suspect that Kaiza’s concern about the continental African is similar to my
concern about the South African ‘black’. Admired in the time of struggle, sometimes the object of adoration, sometimes of sympathy and then the target of charity
for whom even in his own free country he still has to be affirmed through special
policies designed to advance him. An abandonment of the will to struggle, it is
called affirmative action. Free people do not clamour for affirmative action, they
build civilizations.
The South African ‘black’ conducts himself/herself as if history owes them
something, now and into the future. In this, the South African ‘black’ desires to
inherit the extractive state that will always reproduce him as a phenomenon. If the
South African ‘black’ is to be in pursuit of ‘blackness’ in perpetuity when will he
ever be free to be not black? For the ‘black’ is a fabrication, a figment of history,
wherein the human that he once was vanished in sacked villages and broken
families, that still break; swallowed up by mines and factories and farms
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that still swallow; disappeared in books and films that were never about him. The
South African ‘black’ as a figment of history became a distractor and a detractor
from his human value.
The South African ‘black’ in persistent pursuit of ‘blackness’ gives up simultaneously the historic opportunity to be the new human standard. The human
standard they once sought to replace was ‘the horror’ of a world in which high
yield returns were manufactured out of used and discarded ‘black’ humanity for
the prosperity of the ‘white’ standard bearers of that world. The ‘black’ now
wants unearned ownership of the same structures of high yield extraction that
are certain to reproduce him. In this pursuit, the ‘black’ chooses ‘black’ leaders
appropriately.
Particularly in the last five out of 20 years, the South African ‘black’ is galloping
downhill. Leading the gallop is a leader who fits the image of buffoonery that has
underscored in history the contempt for the ‘black’, by its opposite, the ‘white’.
The history of uneven power relations between master and slave has seen the
emergence of a particular kind of buffoon. The buffoon is the intelligent ‘black’
who masks his intelligence in the pretense of stupidity. But this buffoon is really no
buffoon. He is a person who by playing the fool endures the inner pain of selfdegradation in the business of arousing the amused superiority of those with absolute power over him. Cowering outside, but simmering with rage and shame inside,
he survives another day. In South Africa, it has taken at least 200 years to produce
and nurture him.
One of them has risen to the highest office of the land. He was judged by those
who chose him to possess the best qualifications for the job: hundreds of criminal
charges that have yet to be tested before a court of law; a history of moral indiscretion, and an exuberant capacity to sing and dance, and move crowds. Once
settled into the job, he proceeded to be who he always has been.
His greatest achievement thus far has been to build on his rural private property
with public funds, a palace. In its magnificence, it glitters opulently in the manner
of Ayi Kwei Armah’s Atlantic Caprice on top of a hill overlooking an urban sea of
poverty, in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Then following a public outcry,
he then began to deny any knowledge of how the palace came to be. Such public
denials of actions formally attributable to him in the structure of state governance
have become a pattern of Jacob Zuma’s leadership. What do we make of them?
It must be that where there may have once been the inner pain of selfdegradation, there is now an inner sense of entitlement. The ‘black’ buffoon,
now in power, wants to own everything that once degraded him. But since he
cannot admit to the desire for unbridled ownership, he resorts to what was once
one of the sources of his pain: he deploys the lie. He avers that what is, is not.
This is the ‘black’ at highest moment of triumph: a politics absolved of ethics and
morality. The laughter of incredulity is one of its rewards.
It is time for South African ‘blacks’ to no longer put store on ‘blackness’.
To continue to do so is to insist on living in a liminal space in which dream and
effort have been become disentangled almost permanently. It is time that the South
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Ndebele
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African ‘black’ began to appreciate the value of aspiring towards the universal and
then to live in it, to become a part of it, to add to it the cumulative value of the
experience of being free in the specificity of their historical circumstances, where
dream and effort are inseparable.
So, am I a ‘Black’? I once was, but no more. Am I an African? Yes, but with
qualifications. Beyond the typifying singularity of the colonized African, there is no
place anymore for that ‘African’. Am I a ‘comrade’? Decidedly not! That kind of
struggle that required ‘comrades’ is long over! Am I a citizen? Yes: although my
voice and my actions have yet to be strong enough to assert their formative constitutionality. The fact that the legacy of extractive conditions continues to spawn
corrupt leaders mean more work despite 20 years of trying.
Am I a ‘human being? Resoundingly yes!
We make our contributions to ourselves and to the world at large by being who
we are and striving to be the best that we can be first to ourselves and then to
others, not because we have proclaimed ourselves to them, but because they have
voluntarily sought to emulate our example. Humans aspire to the highest moral
and ethical goals. And then because they are human, they trip and fall, and then
rise and keep trying. They create institutions that help them rise and try. For that
reason, the most successful of humans in history, protect their institutions with
rigorous intent because they create such institutions for the greatest common good
to protect themselves against themselves. The pitfalls of being human are a timeless
feature of human history. In our pursuit of an inclusive state of society, institutions
will give shape to our communal efforts.
Wherever we will be, at home or at school, or on the factory floor, or in the
office somewhere in the high-rise cityscape, on it the dark depths of the mine,
or in the farms and rolling rural landscapes, or in the township or city, or in
the tavern, or in the theatre, or on the catwalk or in a conference, we find our
deepest value.
So, to be or not to be ‘no longer at ease’? I have made my choice. It is time to
have to be at ease with myself, and with ourselves. The novel that shaped my social
and political imagination urges me to keep on moving far beyond the time of its
urgent promptings. There are new urges to prompt me: to be a human being
grateful to be a citizen of a continent and of a country that should never, ever
give up their historic promise to themselves. Out of that communal commitment
will come our new story to the world.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
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Notes
1. Keynote address to the 40th African Literature Association conference at the University
of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 10th April 2014.
2. See ‘The Hollow Men’, Eliot (1985: 85).
3. The two following paragraphs are drawn from Ndebele (2014: 205–215).
4. I discuss this moment further in the preface to Ndebele (2007: 9–10).
References
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Eliot TS (1985) The Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber.
Kaiza D (2011) But why, Father? Looking back on the legacy of the African Writers Series,
fifty years on. Transition 106: 88–105.
Ndebele N (2007) Fine Lines From the Box: Further Thoughts About our Country. South
Africa: Umuzi, pp.9–10.
Ndebele N (2014) Reading Chinua Achebe: Footholds in the flood of history. In: Clarke NA
and Currey J (eds) Chinua Achebe: Tributes and Reflections. Branbury, UK: Ayebia.
Nyembezi S (1969) Mntanami! Mnatanami! Johannesburg: Bona-Pers.
Author biography
Njabulo S Ndebele is the past vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town,
where he served two terms. He has a Master of Arts in English Literature from
the University of Cambridge and a Doctorate of Philosophy in Creative Writing
from the University of Denver. He was a previous Ford Foundation scholarin-residence, vice-chancellor and principal of the University of the North and
vice-rector of the University of the Western Cape. He holds honorary doctorates
from universities in the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Japan, South Africa and
the United States of America. He is currently chairman of The Mandela Rhodes
Foundation, the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
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