Chapter 9: Leave no Mark: Escape

“The story my parents want to tell is different from the one I want to write.

My dad wants to recount the political history of South Africa and the Movement. He wants to tell me about the comrade-uncles in Lusaka and London who I knew as a toddler and young child, explaining how they – and he – fitted into the broader trajectory of the ANC. My mum wants to tell the story of the people who shaped her activism, like Joe Gqabi, who guided her as she told him about the discontent at Phefeni, and her friend Baba who turned up with his Beetle on June 16. The story she wants to tell is one of shared effort and history.

The story I want to tell is of my gentle yet courageous dad, and how the path he chose cost him dearly. It is the story of my beautiful mum, barely in her 20s, with bravery I cannot imagine ever possessing. It is of both of them in love, idealistic and determined. It is of my feisty, fearless and fun-loving aunts and uncles, and my grandparents, the quiet revolutionaries.

In reality, I met a lean, dark-suited gentleman, whose height dwarfed mine. Was he going to talk about his prison days? Ask me about Kenyan politics? Or simply voice his dreams for a South Africa whose leadership he would soon assume? He didn’t ask about any of these things. He talked mostly about books: what African writers had meant to him and his fellow political prisoners, and how books had played a role in buoying their spirits. Books, books, and more books. I felt as if through me he was talking to all writers of the world.

The most compelling thing about Mandela is how he endured those years of solitary confinement and other torture without ever surrendering to the racist vampires. In him people see the infinite capacity of the human spirit to resist and to conquer. Do we not for the same reason identify in literature with characters like Prometheus? And in history with people like Paul Robeson, Kwame Nkrumah, Ho Chi Minh, Nat Turner, Toussaint Louverture, Kenyan freedom fighter Dedan Kĩmathi, Zimbabwean resistance leader Mbuya Nehanda, and martyred Chilean poet and singer Víctor Jara?

All these figures are heroic because they reflect more intensely in their individual souls the souls of their community. Their uniqueness is the uniqueness of the historical moment. They make history even as history makes them. They are torches that blaze new paths. Each torch has been lit by the fire of the masses, and every time the flame seems to fade, the great ones turn to their people for more energy.

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.

An excellent student of South African literary and intellectual history, Mphahelele was aware of the words of R.V. Selope Thema in an issue of the Chamber of Mines weekly newspaper for workers, Umteteli wa Bantu (Mouthpiece of the People), in March 1929:

The duty of Bantu writers and journalists, as that of writers and journalists of other races, is to call the attention of the leaders to the things that are detrimental to the interest and welfare of our people. A writer who does not criticize and correct the mistakes of his people does not fulfill the purpose for which God endowed him with the power of the pen. A writer is a prophet, and his duty is not only to prophesy but also to rebuke, when necessary, the people for wrongdoing; to criticize, when occasion demands it, the conduct and methods of the leaders of his race, and point out the way of salvation.