When John Coetzee won the Nobel prize for literature this year, South Africans did not dance in the streets. "A novelist little read or understood in his own country," wrote Le Monde, when the award was announced. That was putting it mildly. I don't recall much festivity, either, when, a few years back, he won the Booker prize for a second time with Disgrace. Admiration abroad and dismay at home, where Coetzee has been called a sexist, racist impostor.
What lies behind the puzzlement, the derision, is the feeling that "they," that is "the west" or "the north" in new South African speak - meaning much the same place as "the outside world" in old South African speak - are ganging up on "us," by rewarding writers who run the country down. For what is under attack is not Coetzee's writing but his attitude to life, liberation, and the new South Africa. He is a seditious, cerebral novelist, obsessed by questions of loneliness, liberty and guilt. And that is politically worrying, and unSouth African. Coetzee, wrote one commentator, was a "western" writer who happened to live in Africa - for "western" read "white."
Ten years after South Africa broke with its past, skin colour is still king. It is the bogey of the past, rising up to haunt the new day, writing promissory notes to "freedom" and "the future" while up to its neck in ancient debts to race, nation, party and a peculiar notion of political perfection which only the chosen attain.
It is very odd. Here is a society so drugged by pursuits of sporting prowess that when the national rugby team loses a string of games it is acceptable for a fan to invade the pitch and punch the referee. But when one of our authors wins every prize in sight, we duff up the writer.
There never was a time when this wasn't so. South African writers have always been caught between the politicians and the philistines, often the same people wearing different hats. The last white regime was convinced that most writers were in cahoots with pinko-liberals in foreign lands, plotting the subversion of true sons and daughters of the African soil - by whom they meant themselves. Those who shape and polish words need watching, if not whacking.
The Dutch, who first colonised the tip of Southern Africa, disposed of the problem quite simply: they did no dreaming, they built no libraries, their music was the sound of the slave bell and the only books they cared for were those that balanced. The Dutch occupation of the Cape could be described as a state of oppressive torpor interrupted by gunfire. By the time the Dutch left they had established the principle held to by succeeding regimes: if you could not shoot, kick, enslave, or sell it - what good was it?
The British, who took over from the Dutch, refined the principle further. When English settlers like Thomas Pringle dreamed of a free press, like the one he had left behind in England, the governors of the Cape stood against it. Britons had not been brought to South Africa in order to think. They were there to form a bulwark against the revolting natives. Shooting, farming and fighting were the natural activities of the yeoman settler. The free exchange of ideas was dangerous and debilitating. The "arts" were for women and lesser breeds. It is not for nothing that the great South African writer of the 19th century is Olive Schreiner. Her novel, Story of An African Farm, remains as disturbing a dissection of what it means to be a South African as it ever was.
The vigour with which the last apartheid regime persecuted writers was merely an intensification of the norm. White Afrikaner nationalists took writers seriously because anyone who looked hard at how we were, and didn't applaud, was up to no good. In the 1970s and 1980s, writers defied the racial mania of the regime not just in what they wrote but by the way they carried on their trade. Work by black and white, Asian and mixed-race writers, ran side by side in the little literary magazines - as if colour made no difference. That defiance seems naive now, but at the time it was radical. There existed a camaraderie among writers of all shades, and a more spirited literary life than anything to be found today. We wrote in a common language, English, we read from the same platforms, we appeared together in the lists of writers banned and, together, our books vanished from the shelves. Of course, it was an unequal camaraderie. White writers owned shelves, black writers owned nothing. But that, we hoped, would be redressed later.
It was assumed, after 1994, when democracy came, that the old ways of being and writing would cease. I felt great relief at the prospect. Enough was enough. When you make fiction out of politics you risk being, indeed you become, strident; you begin repeating yourself. Well, apartheid was officially dead and inevitably the "old" protest literature would die with it. No more racial nightmares. No more bone-headed bureaucrats telling people what to do. A new crop of young writers would emerge and choose new subjects like love and the drains and the mortgage, themes more healthy, more uplifting and supportive of life in the new South Africa. And many of these new writers would be black.
It has not happened that way. I sat down for several weeks last year to read unpublished novels and stories by young South African students. (They were all in English, of course, and my remarks do not cover literary developments in South Africa's other ten official languages, including Afrikaans.) I could see there has been a swing away from the way we were. These young writers prefer autobiography, fantasy, travel, or interior dramas of domestic love and loss. There is nothing wrong with this. But I couldn't help feeling that much of it was work that rather forlornly mimicked whatever "normal" life in "normal" places was supposed to be. And there was another thing: most of the writers were white, and this in a university where half the students were black.
And then, as if to rub salt in the wound, along comes another white South African writer and his novel, The Good Doctor, is nominated for the Booker prize. Damon Galgut is a post-apartheid writer, and his book is set in the South Africa of here and now. All well and good. You might even be able to get round the ethnic origins of the author, until you read the novel. I was struck by the fact that one of the reasons why it works so powerfully is that it does what "new" writing is not supposed to do. It dwells on the disillusions of progress and the emptiness of political promises. It shows people oscillating, between idealism and anger, between aching inertia and vacuous, often brutal, violence. Everyone in South Africa knows this is the reality - which is exactly why you are not supposed to say so.
South Africa is a decade into majority rule and there has been nothing like the literary flowering predicted. This makes people unhappy, and I share their unhappiness; it would be a relief if things were more even. But those who insist the writers really are there if only we would open our eyes to them, are hallucinating, because they want to believe. I want to believe too. But their bright-eyed and angry insistence reminds me that, in my country, literature is an extension of politics, and talking up the literary renaissance is like talking up the emperor's new clothes.
I'd say the road for black writers is even more bumpy now than it was under the old regime. They face the usual philistinism, just as evident in the new South Africa as in the old; and many of the props and stays that helped or inspired young writers have gone. A number of important black writers have joined the administration and its agencies, and have written next to nothing since. The little literary magazines have all but collapsed. The newspapers are no longer a serious training ground, and the independent publishing houses, which neither bombs nor police raids could close down under apartheid, have been absorbed into conglomerates. The large publishers, aware that lucrative textbook contracts are in the hands of an administration impatient with dissent, are loathe to back work which might be seen as "negative" or "unpatriotic."
There is something else. A new breed of cultural commissars is on the look-out for signs of unSouth African literary activity, and they want a political rectitude as rigid as anything dreamed up by the old censors. If you are a Sowetan who, instead of embarking on a novel of the townships, falls in love with landscape; or a playwright from Kwa-Zulu Natal, fascinated by Chekhov, what must you do? Recant? Lest the guardians of cultural freedom denounce you as a Eurocentric deviationist in thrall to the sub-literature of the old colonial oppressor? For not being suitably "African"?
When I hear the world Africa, I reach for my atlas. Which Africa are we talking about? Who owns the freehold on this great and varied continent? Useless to ask, because this "Africa" is not a place, it is a threat used to whip artists into line. It is a fraud, too. Because what is and is not "African" is a favour which may be granted or withdrawn, when fashion dictates. And so you get a situation where American rap is authentic Africana. So is Mercedes Benz. In Africa, this German brand is such a hit among strong-men, chairmen and business chiefs, that an entire class has been named after a car - "the waBenzi." And Big Brother, a format dreamed up by those cultural demons the Dutch, is said by excited television people to bind all Africa together - but JM Coetzee is bad for your cultural health. Not surprisingly, the "arts" in South Africa are in a state of confusion. What else is to be expected in a climate dominated by commissars and cheerleaders, whose chant is "never mind the quality, feel the authenticity."
Given the conditions, it's remarkable that individual talents come forward at all. Not long ago I was pointed to some work by a black poet from one of the bleakest of the townships. And given these origins his subject is startling; Seitlhamo Motsapi writes about roses. A single long poem appeared in a recent British anthology of verse about flowers and, though I hesitate to say this, for I would not wish the hot breath of the commissars to fall on Motsapi's neck, he reminds me a little of Blake in his freewheeling music. Then, again, he reminds me of no one I can think of:
a million babygreen roses for the grace
that cushioned the unpillowed silences
between dark & dawn
a million sunblue roses for the sisterknots
of seekers singers & supplicants
whose handshaking supple cordial
hallelujahs the Lord forever
Just when things are looking particularly gloomy, someone new pops up. If poets can do it, will novelists be far behind?
