From Le Nouvel Observateur, June 11, 2009
—translated from the French by Bethany Hetrick
With the recent election of Zuma as president, the Afrikaner writer and comrade of Mandela assesses the post-apartheid era and confides his fears and hopes
South Africa: The Grand Disillusion
Le Nouvel Observateur: In your new book, Notes from the Middle World, you publish a letter to Mandela for his 90th birthday in 2008. When he came to power in 1994, you had already written an open letter emphasizing that “your loyalty would take the form of a vigilant opposition.” What changed in South Africa between these two letters?
Breyten Breytenbach: The disappointment is on a scale with my own illusions. There is a great bitterness regarding what the ANC (African National Congress), the party in power, has become. The situation is worse than fifteen years ago, when our hearts were full of optimism and we believed in a change towards social and economic justice. We thought ourselves capable of bringing to life Nelson Mandela’s notion of a “rainbow nation”; this meant carrying to term this process that the ANC would promote a veritable South African nation, necessarily hybrid since it is formed of very diverse components. But this process was interrupted, not as much by Mr. Mandela as by his successor, Thabo Mbeki. Nevertheless, although Mandela has left the political scene, he is still wholly identified with the ANC. One day he said that the first thing he would do as soon as he got to heaven would be to ask where he could register for the ANC. Since 1994 and the ANC’s coming to power, many things have changed, of course. We have seen the rise of a generation of politicians, and especially the participation of a population formerly excluded from all forms of political, legal and also economic activity, to a certain extent. But at the same time we have witnessed the deterioration of institutions, the rise of large-scale corruption and the multiplication of broken economic and social promises. The chasm that separates the rich and the poor has become deeper than it was fifteen years ago, with the difference that among the rich, today you will find many of the ANC’s employees.
N.O.: In this last letter to Mandela, you write of “the obscene manner in which his 90th birthday was celebrated” and denounce the violence, the thefts, the rapes, the pursuit of racism, the absence of public morality. . . A terrible report. How did it come to this?
B. Breytenbach: That’s the great question that many South Africans are asking themselves. To what extent were we mistaken about the moral quality of the liberation movement and of its leaders? Was the country ultimately a poisoned gift for those who inherited it? We ritually evoke the “liberation of South Africa,” but it did not play out in a classic manner: there was no revolutionary rupture or war’s end. Our liberation was the result of a long process, which moreover guaranteed the continuation of the same State. This continues to create several problems, since a certain number of former leaders and notorious war criminals are still protected by the State. Moreover, the country was probably plunged into a much deeper disorder than was initially believed when the ANC came to power. Did the ANC then fail at its mission? Several factors were simultaneously at play. When the desire was to change the institutions of the interior, it was necessary to replace civil servants with new ones. In doing this, we greatly deprived ourselves of expertise. Today, for example, it appears that 60% of the municipalities in the country have gone bankrupt, essentially due to the total negligence and indifference of the new local administrators. You can moan all you want about the former administrative officers, but they were the product of a caste of Apparatchiks who directed the country relatively well. Furthermore, the ANC inherited a good infrastructure, with its roads, schools, universities, hospitals. . .
But behind all that are decisions of a cultural or psychological order that are more difficult to identify. The ANC is a very old organization that has suffered greatly from its years of clandestine existence, during which it knew isolation, perpetual hounding and an obsession with being infiltrated. In its DNA, there is a strong component of almost paranoid victimization. Still today, as soon as it is criticized, the ANC responds immediately, saying: “You cannot understand what it is like to have been in resistance for so long and to have suffered so much in order to liberate the country.” There is also a persistent myth surrounding the ANC: this organization known as the Great Tent which grouped together all of the anti-apartheid tendencies. It went from the left (even left of the Communist party) to the country’s more traditionalist milieus. Hence the demand of a unity that must be preserved by all means. Solidarity within the ANC takes precedence over all other considerations. And while certain administrators, including current president Jacob Zuma, are now being accused of corruption, it is nearly impossible for the ANC to find within itself the moral force necessary for cleaning up its own stalls. This gives rise to a sort of generalization of impunity. And when someone is caught in the act, instead of being relieved of his duties, he is simply “redeployed” elsewhere. This is called “deployment of officers.” As a result, one-third of the executive committee of the ANC is constituted by accused criminals who have been indicted for serious wrongdoing: fraud, theft, or embezzlement of public funds. . . This is why the ANC abolished this special section of Scorpions that had been created precisely to track down economic crimes. A few months ago the Scorpions signed their own death warrant because too many of the leaders of the ANC were implicated. We are indeed in a State with a single party, with all of the risks of “totalitarian drifting” that are implied.
N.O.: Jacob Zuma was just elected president May 6th, after the ANC’s victory in the elections on April 22nd with 65.9% of votes. Jacob Zuma was acquitted of the rape of which he had been accused, and the corruption proceedings of which he had been charged had been dismissed. What do you think of him?
B. Breytenbach: I’ve only met him two or three times. He’s a charismatic man. A real traditionalist, very proud of supporting the Zulu community and of being a polygamist and a great traditional dancer. His past is rich. He has known prisons, exile and the trials of the resistance. But there are shadows cast on the handling of his responsibilities as head of an internal security organ of the ANC. He was led to extremely harsh repression of any attempts at infiltration of the ANC, especially in the camps in Angola. There are a certain number of facts that have been veiled. For example, the brother of the current president of the Constitutional Council was executed by the ANC during the time when Zuma directed its security. Certain people who were tortured by the ANC say that Zuma participated. . . That is all part of the complex history of a man who struggled in difficult circumstances. So will he be able to unify the country? The first signs are encouraging. He has gone to try to meet all of the constituents of this country. He has made contact with people of mixed race, Indians, business groups, Afrikaners. . . Does that mean that he is going to take up the torch of “nation blender” from Mandela? He declares so. But will he not be the prisoner of those who brought him to power? For one cannot forget that he enjoyed the benefit of an internal revolt in the ANC, essentially supported by unions and the South-African Communist party. Will he not be obligated to give a total change of direction toward the left, and what will be the consequences for the nation’s economy? There are a certain number of tensions, not very clear, that he is in the process of handling even within his council of ministers and within his party. Will he not be bound by the necessity to make a compromise between these different factions? He is no longer all that young, and would hardly aspire to a second term of office. Ultimately will he turn out to be merely a figure of transition?
N.O.: You were exiled after marrying a Eurasian woman and faced criminal accusations according to the “Immorality Act” and “Mixed Marriage Act,” which banned interracial sexual relations and marriages. You founded Okhela, an anti-apartheid organization, then were condemned to nine years in prison in 1975 (you served seven years, two of them in isolation) after your clandestine return to South Africa. Faced with the current state of affairs, does the resistance fighter in you feel disillusionment, or rather anger?
B. Breytenbach: It is difficult for me to continue to be angry because that presupposes that one still has the means to be able to do something about it. I feel very strongly—and I am certainly not alone in this—marginalized. But that is entirely normal. After all, the current South African generation displaced the center of gravity. In the past when someone like me, whitish and of Afrikaner origin, was in the resistance, there was a real possibility of weighing on the mental state of those in power because they strongly valued their own identity as Afrikaners. They justified their power by their difference, and in particular by their language, Afrikaans, to which they were very attached. Those days are over. My voice counts for nothing in the ANC today. We calculate roughly that there were 5 million Whites in the country (and still, when we say “Whites” we include light-skinned people of mixed race) at the end of the apartheid. There are maybe 1 million who have already left. So 4 million out of a population of 47 million, around 10%; that’s not many. I do not feel at all like I have the possibility of joining my voice to that of the majority. Furthermore, there is still not a forum in which we can make ourselves heard among the Afrikaners. We have our swords drawn because we are settling old accounts. In brief, we are all over the place; there is an enormous amount of anger, rejection and abandonment…If you look at the situation, for someone like me, where could I intervene in a useful way? I do not see it. But this statement is not necessarily definitive.
N.O.: In Notes from the Middle World, you proclaim yourself an “African bastard.” Aren’t you a man caught in the middle of the stream? With the weight of the past and of colonization, what place can a white man have in Africa today?
B. Breytenbach: I will give two contradictory answers. The first is that, ultimately, the white man has no place in Africa, because his presence was fundamentally only an intermediary tied to colonial history. And in a way, generic or biological, this is not our place. Even more it goes against the current of history, because the world has become such a back and forth of migrations. Nevertheless I feel myself to be fully an African citizen; but almost by default, in the sense that when I am in Europe, I am not European. When I teach in the United States for part of a year, I could never become an American. I know very strongly (and I do not necessarily ask why) that I identify always with Africa as soon as there is a conflict between the African continent and the rest of the world. I have even thought about creating a clandestine organization to go paint on walls the slogan “Africa Lives.” It is almost subversive these days to say that Africa is not dead. Africa lives! And, take heed, it will continue to live, whether you want it to or not.
N.O. What are the three books that you would take with you to a deserted island?
B. Breytenbach: I would certainly take the works of Borges, because of his endless invention and questioning of the individual. I would probably bring The Histories of Herodotus, for its perspective of a traveler facing the infinite. I would be tempted by Raymond Roussel, who wrote about Africa without having ever set foot in it, but instead I would probably choose Dōgen, the great Japanese philosopher of Zen Buddhism.
Remarks compiled by FRANÇOIS ARMANET
from Le Monde: July 10th, 2009
—translated from the French by Bethany Hetrick
Breyten Breytenbach: “The need to retrace my steps more and more”
For the painter and writer, divided between Africa and Europe, writing is the art of taking the world to a higher level. In his latest book, he calls out to political leaders and citizens.
This is a great man. His physique radiates beauty, extreme sensitivity, wisdom and rebel force. He is impressive in his ability to listen and his modesty, his fraternal gentleness and his energy to tear down the walls. His story is a nightmare. Born in South Africa, he arrives in Paris in 1959 at age 20 to study painting and flee a segregated society. Here, he marries a Frenchwoman of Vietnamese origin, becoming an outlaw in his own country that bans mixed marriages (meaning with a spouse of a race deemed inferior). Unable to return with Yolande to live in his native country, in 1975 he goes alone and risks a clandestine stay in South Africa, in the context of the struggle against apartheid. He is arrested, tried and condemned to nine years for “subversive activities.” Documentary filmmaker Richard Dindo used this episode in Breytenbach’s life to construct a beautiful film entitled A Season in Paradise. In the documentary, Breytenbach returns with his wife to the places where he was held as a captive.
Breytenbach comes back with his wife to the places where he was held: Director of the Gorée Institute, which he created near Dakar in order to study and defend African culture and society; professor in New York, exhibiting his canvasses in Amsterdam; he is a bit of a prisoner of this past as an inmate and his engagement as a militant reformer. Breytenbach the artist, the poet, the painter inhabited by African identity and surrealism (inclined towards COBRA), the novelist, the essayist, are wrongly asphyxiated by his image as a humanist insurgent. At the offices of his Parisian publisher, rue Séguier, he welcomes with a smile of recognition the proposition to speak of these similar disciplines: “As with painting, writing is a question of texture, of color, of emptiness.” But why does he sign his canvasses with a Chinese ideogram? “I am drawn to the manner of rendering a noun at once abstract and physically present. This ideogram, which means “ancient river,” is an attempt to rediscover the sonority of my name, Breytenbach, which means “large river.”
Breytenbach: mixed blood from Africa and Europe. The instinctive sense of being in the “right place at the right time” via a relationship with the environment and other people, and these experiences of adventure: having arrived in Lisbon “swaying in a hammock on an ocean liner,” getting drunk in London on brown ale, having earned a plate of food per day as a portraitist in a night club in Nice, in the days when jukeboxes drummed out Sidney Bechet’s Petite Fleur. “I slept under bridges, in abandoned lots, near Hamburg in the rustling of an orchard. . . With tramps and runaways as companions, I awaited my turn to warm the bed in someone’s grayish sheets in a nondescript seedy hotel. And in an old neighborhood in Paris, I met Lady Lotus. Vietnamese cuisine became my favorite kind of food.”
“Our identity is slippery”
The one who became his guide is named “Golden Lotus” in A Veil of Footsteps, a beautiful book in which Breytenbach becomes fractured and is rebaptized Breyten Wordfool, Breyten Wordbird, Breyten Wordprick. A Buddhist, Breyten does not believe in the soul but in the “self,” an entity changing according to our emotions, our experiences. “Our identity is slippery, life is an infinite process of metamorphoses, we don’t write about ourselves but remake ourselves and remake the world.” His favorite animals are the chameleon (are you seeing a pattern?), the camel (fitting for someone who views life as a nomad) and the parrot: “We learn what is essential more by imitation than by understanding.”
Surrealist at heart, fascinated by the death mask that Louis Aragon slaps on his face, Breytenbach sees the writer as a mortician, and the artist as inhabitant of nada, in affinity with death. “I am struck by the decline of consciousness, the incapacity of doing, the power of the unknown that struggles against our desire to bring the light.”
But what is writing for Breyten Breytenbach? An art of imagining; meaning to invent progress, to take the world to a higher level and “to be better than we are.” He therefore pleads for lies, this art of seeing ourselves as more beautiful, more intelligent and honest than we are: “The desire to make believe that we respect each other, that we do not want to kill each other, is a lie, but an essential lie! International relations rest on this delicately maintained balance. In the past, we had a chief of state in South Africa: Botha. ‘It matters little if he is racist, what is important is that he acts as if he were not,’ we said! Because who knows if, by dint of making “as if,” he will cease to be racist? Lying is useful, essential, in politics as in literature. It goes hand in hand with the ability to imagine oneself otherwise.”
“The Middle World” is a place imagined by Breytenbach in his new book, a world beyond where thinking counters all hegemony, “in disobedience to power and in our identification with the poor.” It is an art of remaining invisible among the rejected, of dreaming of a perfect world, an asylum for the excluded, the pariahs, “vagabonds of the global village, knights of the naked star. They define themselves by what they are not or are no longer.” Adds Breytenbach, “It is the universe of people who are not in the right network, who live the exoticism of Rimbaud’s unknown cities, those who discover the charm of others. They live a solitary journey.”
“The Middle World” has its cities of transit (Beirut, Sarajevo, Hong Kong . . .) its heros (Hannah Arendt, Einstein, Kafka, Le Clézio – who said that the ex-iled one was he who had left the island), its utopia: “It’s heaven on earth, somewhere where we would be free, responsible for ourselves and others, without restraint.” Breytenbach proposes a list of citizens of “The Middle World.” There one finds people who are “not hidden behind arrangements,” and the list moves from the Dalai Lama to Pessoa, by way of Borges, Matisse, Lorca, Billie Holiday, Eric von Stroheim, Beckett, Django Reinhardt, Man Ray. . . A nice horde of “non-citizens.”
In fact, don’t these adopted ones have the profile of China dolls? “These are people who have embodied a metamorphosis”; have become foreigners. Do we see clearly in the middle kingdom, which is also a place of exiles? “Feeling a stranger everywhere is total freedom for Edward Said. I have an ache, a need to retrace my steps more and more, where I have already been. But exile as a manner of pitying oneself is unacceptable.”
Jean-Luc Douin
(translated from the French by Bethany Hetrick)