Chapter 1: Umntu Akalahlwa: The Months Before

“It wasn’t enough to see that something was wrong, her grandfather taught her. It was imperative to do something about it.

If you ask my mum today when she first became aware of apartheid, she will tell you it was a teenager, when she became involved with the Black Consciousness movement. But some of her earliest memories are of white police raiding homes in her neighbourhood looking for Black men who did not have permission to be in the area. At eight years old she watched as long lines of men shackled to each other were forced to walk the streets of the township, before being loaded into police vans.

In West Africa they call him a griot. Swahili civilization is replete with poets, leaders of thought spanning centuries. A book edited by Abdilatif Abdalla and published by Mkuki na Nyota, Kale ya Washairi wa Pemba (The Past of Pemba Poets), lists quite a few, including Fumo Liyongo wa Baury in the twelfth century, and Suudbin Said Al-Maamiriy in the nineteenth century. These poet-intellectuals largely saw themselves as the voices of the people and seekers of justice.

In the famous 1963 essay “The Novelist as a Teacher,” Achebe wrote, “If I were God, I would regard as the very worst our acceptance, for whatever reason, of racial inferiority.” He went on to define his role as a writer as that of an educator trying to help “my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-denigration.”

In the South African system, people see the bitter fruition of at least five forces that have bedeviled the development of human beings: classical colonialism, neocolonialism, slave wages, racism, and the usurpation of the people’s sovereignty through the denial of democracy.

But Black South Africans are not endlessly helpless victims of superior forces. Their history presents a people who have been pioneers in the struggle for communal survival, national liberation, and social emancipation. The ferocity of Black South African resistance blunted the determined efforts of European settlers to annihilate them.

This is still true in contemporary times. Writers have to be the voice of the voiceless. They have to give voice to silence, especially the silence imposed on a people by an oppressive state. The South African writer has played this role bravely and magnificently in the past, from Krune Mqhayi to Breyten Breytenbach. For their words alone, some of them have faced torture, exile, and death. Indeed, there were times when the South African writer, at home or in exile, was the most eloquent voice of the silenced. Some writers chose to engage in the very struggle they talked about in their books.