EZEKIEL MPHAHLELE

The question may arise: why is A Passage To India or An Outcast of the Islands or Light in August a better novel than, say, Cry, The Beloved Country or The Story of An African Farm or God’s Stepchildren or Turbott Wolfe with regard to non-white characterization?

Forster’s Aziz, Conrad’s Aissa, and Faulkner’s Joe Christmas have much greater freedom of movement than their South African counterparts. They are not tethered to any sort of didactic standard. They are not there to justify themselves, to vindicate themselves and their race. They are not direct carriers of a message. As a result they can be carried through several emotional states and react to different situations in various ways that indicate a development.

Note the delicate changes of mood and temper Aziz displays when he meets his own people, Cyril Fielding and Mrs Moore as distinct from his manner of behaviour when he meets Ronny Heaslop, Major Callendar and the Turtons. In spite of his disillusionment after the Malabar Caves incident which embitters him, Aziz still loves Mrs. Moore’s children and Fielding. And then he resolves that there cannot yet be a meeting point between East and West until the English quit India. We see the other side of Aziz in his domestic surroundings – among his children and with the constant memory of his late wife. Aissa’s love for Willems has many subtle aspects to it, so has her hate eventually. Joe Christmas is not just a simple charcter whose lynching is predictable.

These three characters suffer and endure a good deal because of their frailties. They are not just victims of external circumstances. Paton’s Kumalo suffers as a result of external conditions, and his outlook is rigid, immutable in any situation. Plomer’s view precludes any development of character because his non-whites represent the inviolability, if not the violence, of Africa.

Most of Nadine Gordimer’s Non-European characters emerge only to disappear into the background. Compare many of her domestic servants with Faulkner’s, like Nancy in the short story, That Evening Sun^{[1]In Faulkner’s County}. We know Nancy’s background, the hovel she goes back to after working for whites; we know her fears, doubts. She lives in mortal, neurotic fear of her husband, Jesus, whom she has wronged because she is with child by a white man. We know Jesus’ attitude of helplessness in relation to whites. “I can’t stop him,” he says, “when white man want to come in my house, I ain’t got no house. I ain’t got no house. I can’t stop him, but he can’t kick me outem it. He can’t do that.”^{[2] op. cit.}

But we know very little about the inner lives of Nadine Gordimer’s servants. They are not meant to talk or perhaps even think. Faulkner records a considerable amount of cross-communication of feeling and thought in this story between servant and master and his children, as much as we can expect within the limits of a short story.

We miss this cross-communication in all of Miss Gordimer’s stories,primarily because the presence of non-whites in her stories are an artificial device used for reflecting the attitudes and behaviour of her white characters.

Faulkner’s short stories have thus greater breadth and depth.

Perhaps the main weakness in South African writers is that they are hyper-conscious of the race problem in their country. They are so obsessed with the subject of race and colour that when they set about writing creatively they imagine that the plot they are going to devise, the characters they are going to create and the setting they are going to exploit, must subserve a frightfully important message or important discovery they think they have to make in race relations.

When William Plomer, for instance, wrote his Turbott Wolfe, he was writing as a white man who had discovered a new continent with a distinct type of violence; a people with a beautiful culture that was resisting a domineering white culture, and the race attitudes and relations peculiar to such a set-up.

When he writes his Paper Houses much later – a collection of short stories set in Japan – he is more experienced and race contacts no longer arouse in him a romantic revolt or admiration and desire to suggest a solution. He simply writes about human beings and human problems as seen against a class structure which is to be found anywhere outside Japan. For this reason the stories are more important than his novel for their characterization of non-whites.

What conflict or reconciliation there is between the Orient and the West is merely implied in the character of Chiyé and the young student in the story A Piece of Good Luck.^{[3] In Paper Houses.}

Such Orient-West relations are not a sermonising outside Plomer’s characterisation as in Turbott Wolfe. There the old missionary, Nordalsgaard, feels he has been conquered by Africa; there is talk of the violence of Africa; the bestiality of Romaine; of Bloodfield’s neurotic hate and the marriage between Mabel van der Horst, a Hollander, and Zachery the African. But these passions and attitudes become mere topics, because there is not one African character built around them.

It is beyond the scope of a dissertation such as this to suggest a remedy for the shortcomings here gestured at in South African fiction. My work will have served its purpose if it demonstrates that these shortcomings exist and that they consist mainly in a failure to realize that “African character” is itself a fiction and that the imagination which cannot inhabit the life of others than its owner would be better employed in the compilation of blue books^{[4]“Good for him – this is a typically acerbic and insightful comment. The Blue Books were annual reports about colonial territories in Africa, which were submitted to the Colonial Office. The reports are available online.” David Attwell, email correspondence Wednesday 3 July, 2024.} about Africa than in the attempt to generalise artistically about an unknown.

December 1956

THE NON-EUROPEAN CHARACTER IN SOUTH AFRICAN ENGLISH FICTION by Ezekiel Mphahlele, B.A. (HONS.) (S.A.). Submitted to satisfy the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of English UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA. Date handed in: December, 1956. The above excerpt is the closing section of the dissertation. Mphahlele was given the name Ezekiel at birth but changed his name to Es’kia in 1977.