KELWYN SOLE

Matshoba and Black Consciousness

By the early 1970s, it was obvious that the crackdown on black political organisations and anti-apartheid groups of the previous decade was under challenge from a combative new ideology which had taken root among young black intellectuals: the ideology of Black Consciousness. In the face of apartheid’s divisive racial policies, these young men and women realised that apartheid could only be resisted by a new demeanour among black people, both on an individual and collective level; and a number of organisations relating to political, community self-help, worker and other issues were formed from 1968 onwards. Black Consciousness constructed its appeal on a rejection of assimilation and the gradualist, ameliorative politics of the past. Stressing instead the need for black unity and self-reliance, it promoted the positive attributes of pride assertion, and the need to formulate black viewpoints and goals to counteract both white racism and the sway white liberal views had held over black political initiatives in the past.

It can readily be seen that the ideological thrust of this new philosophy suggested a necessity for activity on the cultural and psychological fronts as well as the political. Highlighting the necessity for expressions of black identity, experience and viewpoints, Black Consciousness led to a cultural revival among black artists and writers. Forms such as literature could be used to expose social conditions and the true nature of apartheid, allow individuals to express their emotional anger at denigration, and promote the spread of the message of Black Consciousness among a black audience. Writers saw themselves as the spokespeople of the black community, whom they should be prepared at all times to learn from as well as teach. Elitism in art, or notions of ‘art for art’s sake,’ were vehemently opposed, as black artists sought to “create a new collective consciousness, for which Black Consciousness . . . stands” (Mzamane 1984, 159) and to discover a fresh aesthetics which was pertinent to this goal and which was relevant to black people. Consequently the literature that emerged saw its purpose as both normative and transformative, attempting to forge a new conception of subjectivity among black individuals who could thereupon join together with others who similarly perceived the need to combat apartheid on all fronts. Notions of subjecting their literature to, or evaluating it through, pre-existing literary ‘standards’ were rebuffed: Black Consciousness artists wished to discover fresh aesthetic perceptions pertinent to their goals and relevant to black people. In a famous quote from 1980, anthologist Mothobi Mutloatse stressed the need for black artists to “pee, spit and shit on literary convention … to experiment and probe and not give a damn what the critics have to say” (1980. 5).

Black Consciousness literary expression tended in the beginning to favour those forms which lent themselves to immediate dissemination and audience participation, such as drama and performance poetry. By the end of the 1970s, however, and particularly after the inception of the literary magazine Staffrider in 1978, more space was available for fiction writers who supported Black Consciousness to practise their craft. One of the first of these was Mtutuzeli Matshoba.

Responding to the 1976 student uprisings with a “beserk” need to “spill some of [my life’s] contents” out on paper, and fuelled by his admiration for the new philosophy and his general wish to “reflect through my works life on my side of the fence, the black side” (Matshoba 1979, x).^{[1]Matshoba’s assumption that literature acts mimetically to reflect reality can he seen in his statement that he sees his writing “as a window onto the black way of life” (quoted in Vlessing 19116, 1930). More widely, he asserts that literature “enables you to state your case before you act. It is a way of indicting the person against whom one is to act or is acting so that person will understand the ‘why’ of it” (1931). Both statements show that Matshoba did not address himself only to a black audience.} Matshoba wrote short fiction which appeared in published form in the weekly newspaper The Voice and Staffrider from 1978 onwards. In its early days Staffrider attracted a large readership, especially in the black townships, and Matshoba was easily the most prominent, and most imitated, of its fiction writers.^{[2]By 1980 Staffrider‘s print run was 7 000 copies; it was estimated that each copy that entered the townships passed through the hands of approximately six readers (See Kirkwood 1980, 26-29.).} He was thus, for a time, possibly the most influential fiction writer in South Africa:

He has . . . become identified with the magazine. and this association is not gratuitous. Staffrider, with its revolutionary insistence on allowing the voices of hitherto suppressed and silenced groups to be heard … in whichever style they chose, regardless of traditional literary-aesthetic norms, opened up new possibilities for black literary expression in this country.

(MacKenzie 1990. 30)

The intermingling of descriptions of black social conditions, political analyses, calls to action and heartfelt emotional outpourings in these stories align them immediately with the general impetus of the Black Consciousness philosophy Matshoba embraced.

The Initial Reception of Call Me Not a Man

Many of Matshoba’s stories were published in book form as the collection Call Me Not a Man in 1979, and their reception was initially extremely favourable. Newspaper and academic reviewers spoke in glowing terms of his detailed observation of black experiences under apartheid, and commented on the manner in which the stories tried to marry political concerns with literary skill. Alan Paton judged them the “best South African short stories I have read for a long time,” noting that they had a power to “entertain and hold and even enthral the reader. Much polemical story writing fails this test” (1979); the newspaper columnist Doc Bikitsha praised the “detailed observation and compassionate empathy with those areas where apartheid is most deeply felt” and spoke warmly of their “vision of a growing identity, and a growing commitment to a realistic future for blacks in South Africa” (1979); while the academic David Maughan Brown suggested that the whole collection was “a landmark in the development of South African short-story writing” (1985, 218).

Commentators recognised from the beginning that Matshoba’s stories were stylistically something of a novelty in South African literature. A number commented on their innovative and multi-generic aspect, noting that the ‘thinness’ of the fictional veneer rendered the experience of being black in South Africa both graphic and immediate. Formal idiosyncrasies of his style, such as the interspersing of the more obviously fictional episodes in the texts with poetry, exegetical statements and philosophical digressions, continued to raise interest and comments for a number of years.^{[3]See the comments by David Bunn and Daniel Kunene in Kunene et al. (1989, 19, 35); as well as Martin Trump (1988, 39-40); and Michael Chapman (1991, 6).}

There have been critics who have attempted to define and characterise the particular nature of Matshoba’s stories more fully. Making links between black African and American practice, Jenny Williams suggested that an admixture of first-person narration and fictionalised autobiography was central to the aesthetics of African-American writing, and drew attention to Matshoba’s similarities to this. His style functions, she proposed, to make the individual exemplary rather than unique, and enacts a notion of the self as representative, typical and ordinary (1990, 6-7). Employing a Marxist paradigm, Michael Vaughan traced how the stories showed one of the new directions South African fiction was moving towards in the 1970s; a direction with different aesthetic and ideological premises to the convention of “liberal realism” which had previously held sway in English-language literature. In his opinion Matshoba was a leading exponent of a new mode of “populist realism,” dispensing with a concern for subtle and elaborate characterisation and interiority as well as the personal character encounters familiar in “liberal realism.” Instead, “populist realism” incorporates, but goes further than, detailed description and mimesis; eventually emerging as a project in political (self-) education that reflects a desire for self-definition contingent on the overwhelming necessity for communal solidarity and effort among the oppressed black majority. Paying less attention to the special texture of literary expression, this form of realism was realised as a formal mode by a group of young writers deprived of a conventional school education in literature as a result of censorship and the Bantu Education system; who were seeking an appropriate aesthetic to define themselves and to serve as a foundation for appealing to a less literary black audience.^{[4]For further discussion of these points, see Maughan Brown (1985, 217-18), Vaughan (1982, 118.22; 1984, 196.97; 1985, 195-98).}

Some of the early attempts to distinguish the stylistic particularities of Matshoba’s stories suggested that, if anything, he was a new kind of ‘storyteller’ at work within a modernising environment. Their specific narrative texture feeds the illusion that the author and the first-person narrators generally employed in most stories are one and the same; and that they in turn merge into the numerous anonymous figures of the township whom they represent and for whom they speak (Kirkwood 1988, 1-2). The narrator’s tendency to directly address readers and comment on the fictional action as it unfolds, when taken together with the confidential tone he employs and his friendly, conversational façade; the employment of exemplary incidents and stereotypical characters; the preponderance of conversation and debate: and the stories’ overall ethical and didactic intention all point to the oral, folkloric and communal aspects of this style.^{[5]For further discussion of some of these points, see Trump (1988, 36-39), Trump (1990, 168), Chapman (1996, 373-74) and Maughan Brown (1985, 217-18).}

That there is a trace of the oral mode present is beyond question: indeed, in some of his stories (such as To Kill a Man’s Pride and A Glimpse of Slavery) he goes so far as to introduce song and sound effects into his fiction, or write in the form of a dramatic dialogue. Yet such a ‘storytelling’ designation requires more detailed analysis for, as David Bunn has noted, Matshoba’s stories are more properly an interpenetration of individually written short fictional and communal storytelling modes, inhabiting a generic space somewhere between the two (1989, 35). Referring to Walter Benjamin’s well-known article The Storyteller, Vaughan has spent most time arguing for the storytelling characteristics of Matshoba’s work.

According to this critic the stories display a number of qualities associated with the oral storyteller, that figure whose presence has been displaced in the twentieth century by the novel and its modernising imperatives. Matshoba’s narrators are frequently travellers, who experience life over a wide range of geographical locales and matters of concern and participate directly in the anonymous, communal life of their fellows through the interchange of experience and viewpoints, whilst exhibiting fellow-feeling and giving counsel.^{[6]This is a constant theme in Vaughan. 1ts most direct expression can be found in Vaughan (198Ia: 45-47). For Benjamin’s original article, see Benjamin (1973, 83- 109).} Mike Kirkwood, then co-director of Ravan Press, noted a few months after the publication of Call Me Not a Man:

I confess that I find it difficult as I read Matshoba’s stories, not to see him in front of me. It is the polar opposite of James Joyce paring his fingernails behind the complete and self-sufficient artwork. And these aren’t ‘short stories’ because the short story suggests deliberate artifice to me, pre-eminently among prose-forms. Neither are they stories in the traditional sense. Yet Matshoba seems to me the story-teller come to life, all the same.

(quoted in Mzamane 1986: xxiii)

Matshoba: Storytelling, Innovative Realism or Ineptitude?

It is noticeable, however, that, from the beginning, a strain of uncertainty was visible in some critics’ pronouncements as to the formal value of the stories. Lionel Abrahams, for instance, interspersed his positive comments with an anxiety that they disregarded “a number of rules for effective fiction” — in particular those regarding lack of narrative economy and the disruption of the illusion of fictionality (1979).^{[7]Abrahams hints at the occasional absence of “subjugation of the material to the form, for integrity of the illusion, and . . . objectivity in the presentation of characters”(1979).} Yet despite this, there was a general consensus during the late 1970s and early 1980s among liberal and radical critics, black writers and readers alike that Matshoba was one of the most notable of the fiction writers of his time. However, from 1984 onwards Njabulo Ndebele, recently returned from university studies in England and the United States, subjected Matshoba and other Black Consciousness writers to a wide-ranging and influential series of critiques. He accused them of remaining content to stress the most spectacular and superficial aspects of black South African society. Content to comment moralistically on their oppression, their predilections had resulted in a mimetic, descriptive literature able only to reiterate the Manichaean terms of apartheid, and inadequate to the task of drawing black readers into a process of empathy or allowing them to experience themselves as anything but victims. In the case of Matshoba specifically, he felt that:

Matshoba’s depiction of social reality in his stories [is] simply too overwhelming. His basic technique has been to accumulate fact after fact of oppression and suffering, so that we are in the end almost totally grounded in the reality without being offered, at the same time, an opportunity for aesthetic and critical estrangement.

(1984. 46)

Taking issue with Vaughan’s positive evaluation of Matshoba’s emphasis on “situation” rather than individual experience, and his concomitant suggestion that a concern with individual subjectivity in character development inclined writers towards “bourgeois individualism,” Ndebele advocated a return to full-bodied characters who were more than “mere ideas … marshalled this way or that in a moral debate.” For Ndebele, good writing should be more concerned with processes of injustice than finished products. Focusing on characters’ inner processes of thought and understanding, even if they were “villains” within their social context, would allow the audience to see them “condemn themselves through their dramatised effects” (44, 46-47). Shortly thereafter, Lewis Nkosi added his voice to this condemnation (in an article which also criticised Ndebele’s fiction) when he censured Matshoba’s “naive realism,” which he believed owed a great deal to a “frustrated desire to abolish any space between literature and the horrible reality of apartheid” (1986, 43); and subsequently dismissed any possibility that this work could be seen as “an example of ground-breaking innovation” (1998. 79).

Perhaps the most arresting aspect of Ndebele’s rebuttal of the technical proficiency of Matshoba, though, is the fact that he uses the same article by Benjamin as Vaughan (The Storyteller) to come to a very different assessment. Praising the “impersonal, communal” aspect of storytelling, Ndebele is also confident in his belief that this mode can downplay authorial intervention and thus leave space for reader participation. Where he appears to differ most from the version of storytelling offered by Vaughan, however, is in his opinion that storytellers place a minimal emphasis on politics, embracing rather the wider social reality of ordinary experience (“the everyday”) in their stories, concentrating on individual processes of consciousness rather than political exposition and highlighting the stories’ entertainment value as a necessary mediator for their instructive qualities (Ndebele 1984, 25, 48).

Ndebele’s 1984 article, plus subsequent interventions, effected an alteration in evaluations of the work of not only Matshoba, but also other black writers who were part of the movement of committed, politically and socially explicit art that Black Consciousness had pioneered. Despite publishing a play and giving readings from a novel and fictional autobiography (both still unpublished), within a few years of publishing Call Me Not a Man Matshoba was more or less forgotten in literary circles. He has since shown a facility for script-writing for video and film and, despite emerging as a (somewhat controversial) spokesperson for the Department of Arts and Culture of the ANC in the immediate post-1990 period, has never re-emerged as a literary force within the country.^{[8]Matshoba did however publish a short story-cum-re-examination of history, The Return of Nxele (reminiscent of the Nongqawuse episode in Three Days in the Land of a Dying Illusion) in the ANC journal Mayibuye in March 1992. For information on, and a discussion of, Matshoba’s relationship with film and screenwriting, see Williams (1992). He has subsequently been involved in writing the screenplay for the TV video and film Chikin Biz’nis (1995 and 1998) – his script for the film won the award for best script at the 1999 FESPACO African Film Festival in Burkina Faso – and was one of a team of writers involved in the script of the controversial and highly successful TV drama series nu) Yizo Yizo (1999), depicting problems in a post-apartheid township school. For some idea of his involvement in cultural politics as a DAC spokesperson, see K. Williams (1992/1993), Matshoba (1993) and Bauer and St Leger (1994).} It is more the vogue now to dismiss the value of his work altogether, in particular for its lack of formal value: the lack of aspects such as “setting, conflict, credible characterisation, consistent narrative point of view, the complexities of fictional language and time” (Ndebele 1984, 46) which Ndebele bemoaned in the work of Matshoba’s Black Consciousness compeers of the 1970s.

Interweaving the Individual and the Social

The uncertainties that are discernible in estimations of Matshoba that use terms and perceptions similar to Ndebele could be taken further: for instance, one could point out that these stories do in fact deal with the ‘everyday’ milieux of black people under apartheid. The stories act out —constantly, but most expressly in the story Behind the Veil of Complacency — the fact that

individual life for black people under apartheid could never be interior or private, given the manner in which racist laws enabled the authorities to intrude on the private lives of individuals at any time:

witness, for instance, the fear and helplessness the narrator feels in A Pilgrimage to the Isle of Makana when he hears the voice of a white official who is looking for him in the outer room of his house (Matshoba 1979, 92). This is a world where:

Nothing particular ‘happens…. or rather everything happens that is central to the daily lives of millions of black urban dwellers, but nothing that will satisfy the formalist concerns with climax of story, denouement of plot and so on.

(MacKenzie 1990, 31)^{[9]Although MacKenzie is speaking specifically about the story To Kill a Man’s Pride here, the point can be extended.}

The difference between Matshoba’s and Ndebele’s understanding of this aspect is that, while the latter sees the everyday lives of black people as a source of succour, cultural expression and resistance, the former believes that it is the very acceptance of the quotidian reality of apartheid by blacks which entrenched and naturalised its rule. As Williams cogently remarks, Ndebele’s paean to the ‘everyday’ is simply insufficient in a situation where the ‘ordinary’ and its normal activities have been subjugated to a consistently denigrating power (1992, 32, 34).^{[10]As Matshoba himself states (Vlessing 1986: 1930), his depictions of the ‘ordinary’ serve to bring about individual political transformation: “I thought that letting them see themselves as they are would inspire them to regain their dignity.”}

Given that Matshoba’s short stories now tend to be either downplayed or ignored, it is instructive to look afresh at their taxonomy and achievements. In addressing these it is first and foremost crucial to realise, contra Nkosi, that Matshoba is not simply an unconscious purveyor of faulty writing: to identify his work as merely an assertion of ‘naive realism’ resulting from bad schooling ignores evidence that he had thought about, and tried to address, problems relating to the province of the writer in a conflictual milieu, as well as issues of literary quality and standards.^{[11]See, for example, his remarks in Matshoba (1981, 45).}

It is also overhasty to view Matshoba’s work as unproblematically preferring the collective to the individual. It is more accurate to perceive his work as gesturing constantly towards the collaborative. In line with the Black Consciousness aversion to elitist notions of the artist, Matshoba’s stories constantly act out the mutual involvement of black people (including the narrator) with each other (Trump 1988, 40) through the medium of conversational speech, an approximation of township idiom, and a language generally speaking available to a ‘less Liberal and less literary’ audience (Maughan Brown 1985, 217).

Commentators have tended to accept the notion that this narrator is simply a reflection of the author. This opinion is strengthened by the strikingly mimetic aspect of the fiction: Matshoba had a brother who was a political prisoner on Robben Island, for instance, as does the narrator in A Pilgrimage to the Isle of Makana; both the author and the narrator live in Mzimhlope, Soweto; and no critic can ignore the riposte of an anonymous lawyer to the banning of Call Me Not a Man by the Publications Control Board in 1979 on the basis of the ‘improbability” of its depicted events.^{[12]In “Another Glimpse of Slavery: A Lawyer’s View” (Anon. 1980) the close resonances of Matshoba’s fictionalisation of parolee farm labour in his story A Glimpse of Slavery with the brutal nature of existing practices is made clear. There is no doubt that much of Matshoba’s work was either based on personal experience or on careful research of areas of black experience he did not know. See the interview with the author in Munnik and Davis (1994. 124) as well as the discussion by Davis (1989, 153-55).}

However, while Matshoba’s depiction of the black community is rather more complex and diverse than generally allowed for, there are two basic sets of criteria by which this community is defined. The first is with regard to Black Consciousness attempts to unify the apartheid-generated racial group definitions of African, ‘coloured’ and Indian under the rubric ‘black.’ We see, for instance, that one of the enduring minor themes of A Pilgrimage to the the of Makana is the acceptance of ‘coloureds’ into a racial unity. It is also noticeable that characters appear over and over again through the prism of Black Consciousness’s tripartite designation of people in terms of their attitude towards liberation. Those who embody the majority of vacillating, passive black individuals whom Black Consciousness wished to bring into political awareness and activism, but who remain for the time being “sacrificial lambs” (Matshoba 1979, 15)^{[13]In other stories, see in particular the characters of Ntate Ali (Matshoba 1979, 28) and Martha (73).} fearful of whites, are seen alongside those positive, active individuals such as Soks, a

typical South African urban black youth . . . [who] foresaw Azania, where ability and not the colour of a man’s skin or his creed would be the criterion, where no laws would prevent any human being from living naturally, from being human.

(122-23)

Both groups are positively viewed, et least in their potential, and arc counterposed strongly to the group of  ‘sell-outs’ – the black policemen, community councillors and other agents of the apartheid system who are past redemption.

In addition to these representations of the black community in line with the Black Consciousness viewpoint, there is evidence that mimesis is subordinated to the manner in which the narrator is characterised and positioned in the stories. While it is true that Matshoba is concerned less with characterisation than with situation, and while it is true that the exemplary, modelling purpose of the stories results in a degree of stereotyping of people (especially along racial lines), the character of the narrator is nuanced and carefully crafted. He exhibits what were to Black Consciousness adherents laudable attributes of self-reliance, pride, resourcefulness and assertiveness: but, as importantly, he is self-deprecating, ironic, humorous and compassionate, with an inquisitive, friendly and apparently open-minded streak. It is easy to forget that this supposed naivety is a fictional construct, which allows Matshoba to establish an attitude of acceptance and trust on the part of the reader.^{[14]The artifice on the author’s part is made clear when one notices (for example) the contradictions that emerge around the narrator’s constructed naivety. His fear of the ‘unknown’ when travelling to Cape Town is contradicted by a passage in the same story in which he suddenly appears as a seasoned traveller around the “four provinces” of the country; there is a change of the narrator’s name in two different stories, one pointing towards mimesis, the other fictionalisation (see 95, 110, 112, 146): and there are other discrepancies as well which demonstrate conscious authorial crafting.} Moreover, the importance of travel in a number of Matshoba’s stories – and the narrator’s obsessive self-examination and reflection on experience in those stories where he remains in one place – allow the reader to simultaneously reap the benefits of the first-person narration (an emphasis on subjectivity and a process of discovery through interior monologuing and the highlighting of the narrator’s thought processes) with the mapping of different types of black experience. The narrator acts as “a co-ordinator, a principle of relationship and unity … a co-ordinating consciousness, of critical and reflective estrangement” (Vaughan 1981a, 46) for black readers usually trapped in the impelled immediacy of localised ‘normalcy.’ Even as this fictional agenda of exposing social conditions and urging the need for a black unity that embraces the diversity of different experiences takes hold the author is, through his choice of narrator, ensuring that it happens without a loss of emphasis on the need for subjective self-examination and psychological transformation. The narrator’s love of conversation and his willingness to listen in to other people’s debates and problems offer the resources of collective experience to both the narrator and the individual reader (Vaughan 1982, 132). Thus, while these stories may represent and “speak for a people” (Bikitsha 1979), it is more accurate to say that they enact the intertwined processes of individual and communal self-fashioning Black Consciousness suggested for black South Africans. In order that this may be achieved, Matshoba selects and utilises not only an informing ideology and philosophy, but also a choice of style and focalisation that is anything but artless.

Processing Race: The Compulsions of Ambivalence

Matshoba fashions his stories thematically so that they return again and again to issues of social prejudice, economic disadvantage and political oppression. Given the ambience of apartheid, it is unsurprising that a preponderance of these relate to racial issues. This has led to a number of responses from critics: some white critics in particular have shown unease at what they regard as hints of racism and stereotyping (bordering on caricaturing) of the black ‘sell-out’ and white characters, which appear at odds with the frequently stated narratorial commitment to non-racialism; while others are puzzled at the extent to which “the opinions with which Mtutuzeli Matshoba interlards his narratives are oddly more enlightened than attitudes he reveals in action” (Chapman 1996, 373-74; Abrahams 1979). Others have in their turn criticised the usage of a strongly moralistic discourse explaining racial attitudes as distortions of “human nature” at the expense of any discussion of economic circumstances, despite the occasional ripostes the narrator delivers to the black middle class.^{[15]Such as his perception of himself as a “fly in a milk container” whilst travelling in a friend’s Mercedes Benz (186). For a discussion of the lack of economic explanations, see Vaughan (1981b, 12-13; 1982, 135-36).}

While a close reading of the stories bears out the pertinence of at least some of such assessments, they are in need of qualification and revision. One of the main ideological purposes of Matshoba’s project is to extol the need for black unity in order to overcome the apartheid system, and the overwhelming usage of characterisation is to measure individuals in terms of their potential for this programme. Despite the narrator’s claim that a great deal of the inhumanity of white racism is based on the manner in which they typify and caricature blacks (Matshoba 1979, 6, 8), as a result white characters (such as Koos van der Merwe in A Glimpse of Slavery and Mr Merwe in A Son of the First Generation) tend to be caricatured, with black ‘sell-outs’ (such as Bobbejaan in A Glimpse of Slavery) similarly treated.^{[16]Compare Matshoba 1979, 31, 75 with 35, 40.}

Although a number of mitigating factors for the unrelenting nature of this conceptualisation could be suggested – racial discrimination was, after all, the principal social experience through which black South Africans lived out their experience of oppression under apartheid (Vaughan 1981a, 47), and it can in this case be suggested that a nuancing of characters, racially speaking, is at odds with the ideological goals the author has set himself – no one has explored the effect of the simultaneously ambivalent and ironic attitudes the narrator displays to his own social (especially racial) attitudes. Therefore, although much has been said about the communal intentions of the social representations in these stories and their (un)representativeness, little or no commentary has been forthcoming about the manner in which the representation of the narrator tends to work against the oversimplifying and stereotyping rubric of some of the opinions and enactments offered.

A closer examination of Matshoba’s pronouncements over the decade of the 1980s makes clear that his attitudes to race vary in response to political circumstances. In 1981 he argued strongly against the disbanding of the multiracial P.E.N. branch in South Africa, suggesting that differentiation on the basis of colour among those opposed to apartheid leads to an exaggeration of the differences between them; but five years later his demeanour towards whites appears to have hardened considerably.^{[17]Compare the remarks in Matshoba (1981, 45) and those in Vlessing (1986, 1930-1).}

In his fiction, the vacillating nature of the narrator’s attitudes to race is apparent, but it is clear that the author intended to make this transparent to the reader by devices such as conversation and interior monologuing. In his usual confidential tone, the narrator registers his feelings about race as soon as they arise, thus detailing the indecisive contours of his own emotions. He is achingly aware of the problematic nature of his own utterances – offering, for example, “sincere apologies for labelling people” (Matshoba 1979, 189). In a number of situations, he is torn between his own experiences with ‘sympathetic’ whites and his acknowledgment that the overdetermining racism of the system he was socialised into has had its effect on his own conduct; emphasising through juxtaposition both his prejudices and his attempts to escape them. Human empathy and fellow feeling are juxtaposed with a more distanced, coldly analytical eye. In A Pilgrimage to the Isle of Makana this happens three times in swift succession. As the previously caricatured “penguin” white ticket collector argues with the narrator’s companion on the train, the caricature is disturbed by the more objective perception that here are “two workers flinging their frustrations at each other across the colour line” (102); the “revelation” of white, “fairy” children looking for their nanny in the black section of the train is offset by the narrator contemplating how “innocent little whites [grow] into guilty big whites” (104); and his loss of “bitterness and .. . discomfort” in Cape Town as he befriends Phil, Rachel and Sally persists, despite his simultaneous awareness of their fathers’ “relentless hold on power” (127-28).

Such a split-eye view of the Other is, at times, negotiated through self-irony: the narrator comments on his tendency to view “all people who befriended whites [as] sellouts except myself where Mark … was concerned” (118). As a result of foregrounding the “escalator” emotions he experiences when faced with whites, as well as the implied criticism of himself that these emotions generally proceed or follow, the author allows us to inhabit, and muse over, the processes and causes of his attitudes and prejudices in a manner unusual in anti-apartheid South African literature:

. . . this racism smears all those exposed to it. I have been smeared, for my whole life. My very existence is determined along racial lines. So, normally, if I see a white I see a white and not another human being. My own prejudice can be described as reciprocal or reactive prejudice … an offensive defensive reaction.

(119-20)

Women in the Struggle: Sisters or …?

In addition to the questions about race, criticisms of Matshoba’s analytical and representational procedures have been strengthened by a growing unease at the gender representations in the stories, particularly those pertaining to black women, as well as his perceptions of some of the diverse groupings which make up a putative black unity.^{[18]Vide Zoë Wicomb’s remark that the new-born ‘coloured’ child in A Son of the First Generation is “constructed through a narrative of illicit sexuality, female concupiscence and shame” (1998, 98).}

The discussions and representations around the question of women’s place within the black community and its struggle for liberation are curiously indecisive and even occasionally contradictory. Writing at a time when the phallologocentric tendencies of Black Consciousness are most noticeable,^{[19]For a discussion of the role of women in Black Consciousness in the 1970s, see Ramphele (1991).} the author’s concerns oscillate in and out of accord with such a tendency.

It is obvious that a book entitled Call Me Not a Man has as its goal the compulsion for a new spirit of resilient manliness among black men psychologically damaged by apartheid.

Even if it is conceded that ‘man’ can act as a generic term,^{[20]The female writer Boitumelo Mofokeng asserted at the time: “As Mtutuzeli says, ‘For what is suffered by another man in view of my eyes is suffered also by me’ … This is a feeling shared universally. It does not refer to men alone but it is also shared by women” (Mofokeng 1979, 60).} it is still noticeable that the author at times longs for the “authoritative manner of true African men” and a social environment where men could settle their racial differences in a manly way if it were not for the intervention of women (120, 130-31).^{[21]In the latter example, the narrator and a white manager are fully prepared to settle their differences by trading insults and blows, until a (white) secretary spoils the fun by phoning the police.} Significant too is the way in which the narrator subjects women to his male gaze (the ‘coloured’ woman on Kimberley Station is a case in point [107] ), and the manner in which female characters at times actively assist their own objectification.^{[22]In A Son of the First Generation, Martha (who feels contempt for white women’s willingness to be displayed as ‘ornaments’) accepts her own objectification immediately afterwards: “‘Now you look like the queen of Sheba. Abelungu bakho are going to wish they were black.’ When she looked into the wardrobe mirror she saw that Busi was not flattering her. She wished she were a model and not a tea-girl” (Matshoba 1979, 80).} From his urbanised point of view, the narrator is equally prepared to ‘other’ rural women, in binary terms fluctuating between romantic approbation and denigration.^{[23]Witness the manner in which the narrator, shortly after expressing a paean to “African femininity untouched by western standards” on his visit to the Transkei. speaks of “the picturesque traditional remnants – the huts and the women” (161, 183).}

Yet Matshoba is unusual for the time of writing in that his narrator seems aware of, and registers issues pertaining to, the position of black women. For instance, he allows male and female migrant workers to conduct a lengthy debate about gender problems in rural societies — which the woman, significantly enough, wins — on the bus the narrator shares with them in Three Days in the Land of a Dying Illusion. Furthermore, a number of his female characters are assertive and intellectually critical of male attitudes, such as the historical figure of Nongqawuse, who is prepared to “slip out of those traditional chains and state her mind” (173) in the cattle-killing episode in Three Days in the Land of a Dying Illusion; Martha, who wishes to “marry when I like, not when someone else decides” in A Son of the First Generation (76); and Mapula in Behind the Veil of Complacency, who urges her boyfriend to have “sound criteria for evaluating other people, not just their sex” (192).

It can be suggested, though, that the final trend is to write the female characters into supporting a racial unity spearheaded by men. Mapula, for example, finds that her duty is to understand and contribute “ideas that reinforced [her boyfriend’s] … philosophy” (191), while the woman in the bus ends by chiding the male migrant workers for their lack of masculinity and courage in the face of their (male) chiefs’ willingness to accept a sham independence for the Transkei (156).

Thus the reader experiences a curious sense of disorientation at the narrator’s uncertainty as to whether to treat black women as “beautiful things” or “sisters” (107, 191). Even as women — including the powerful ones — seem more often than not obliged to place their talents and insights at the service of a racial agenda directed by men, it is noticeable that Matshoba exhibits a recurring anxiety when writing about women. Mapula, it turns out, would (if she were as intelligent as her mate) delineate him with a less than kindly epithet;^{[24]“He supposed that if she were sophisticated enough she would have labelled him a male chauvinist pig” (192).} while the narrator in Three Days in the Land of a Dying Illusion, alongside his tendency to feel unmanned by the presence of “examples of African femininity untainted by western standards” whilst in the Transkei (161), is endowed with an self-ironic, bemused tone which serves to destabilise the masculinist philosophy that overdeterrnines the stories as a whole:

Indomitable Xhosa woman, Small wonder my friend ‘Terror,’ Xhosa by birth, vows always never to marry a woman of the same extraction as his. ‘They always have an argument to put up against men. Our mothers were the last disciplined lot of Xhosa women. My sisters – boy!’ – and he ends up by wincing. My answer to him is always that they are all like that from East to West and North to South of this globe, irrespective of ancestry, and that we need to mobilise in time to defend our divine right to make war and reduce the world to rubble.

 (156)

Reassessing Call Me Not a Man

The stories of Mtutuzeli Matshoba fit comfortably neither their initial approving reception nor their current dismissal. There is no doubt that the emphasis on commitment and didacticism Matshoba’s project evinces is at odds with prevailing fashions in South African academic criticism. Moreover, even as it is possible to perceive the significance of these stories in the particular historical moment of the late 1970s, the manner in which they strive to represent and enact a ‘black viewpoint’ in line with Black Consciousness dictates cannot blur the degree to which they contain their own ideological emphases and limitations. As is often the case with fiction that aims to directly promulgate a worldview, there are degrees of counter-mythologising present in the stories — for instance, in the re-telling of the Nongqawuse episode.^{[25]Trump (1990, 164) makes, but does not elaborate on, this point. However, Matshoba’s understanding of the mfecane (1979, 148.50), even if from a ‘black viewpoint,’ can he seen to be one shared by more traditional historians, and in need of the kind of revisions begun in Hamilton (1995).}

It can be pointed out that the belief that the author is consistently a representative black voice, giving voice to community opinions and perceptions,^{[26]See, for example, Trump (1990, 168) and MacKenzie (1990. 29).} needs to be mitigated by an awareness of the degree to which certain types of black social viewpoint are privileged above others. Indeed, while commentators have noticed the problems arising around gender depiction, this has not been matched with any observation of the more noteworthy problems which emerge with the narrator’s portrayal of rural life and migrant workers. These are especially stark in the instance of his self-description in Three Days in the Land of a Dying Illusion as one “of the third denomination” (i.e. a traveller in third-class carriages) along with the other migrant workers. His avowed affiliations in this story are quickly dissipated by a number of blithe, unconscious pronouncements indicating a belief that rural people are intellectually inferior and easily cowed.^{[27]Compare the remarks in Matshoba 1979 143-44, 146, 186 with those in 144, 145, 151. “The country was too dull and therefore mentally unhealthy. How could one develop a keen and creative imagination where the cow set the pace and the silence and loneliness of uninhabited spaces buzzed in one’s ears?” (151).}

The degree to which (for example) critics who propound the ‘storyteller’ model are prepared to furnish radically different evaluations of Matshoba’s short fiction hints at deeper issues being contested than at first are apparent: issues which I would suggest relate to the shifts around sensibility, taste and politico-literary acceptability which have occurred since February 1990. The current desire for more dialogic, ‘democratic’ forms of fiction in South Africa is at odds with the palpable degree of ‘commandisrn’ and narrative closure in Matshoba’s style, although they accord with his goal of using his own fiction as a conscientising tool for Black Consciousness. Matshoba’s narrator frequently sums up the incidents and debates dramatised, and lessons set out, in the stories; going so far as to chide and dismiss readers who do not have sufficient self-awareness and sensitivity to understand them and, on one occasion, even explaining the meaning of a symbol he is using (see 188 and 53 respectively). At worst, Vaughan’s observation that Matshoba represents popular consciousness as politically passive and fragmented (1981a, 47) can be adduced in the fact that the author does not appear always to trust the perspicacity of his readers.

The closing of the distance between speaker and audience implied by the usage of an oral storytelling technique is counterbalanced by a demand, registered stylistically, for a degree of distancing from the action by those readers who wish to understand his purpose. For black South Africans, as the narrator observes at the beginning of Three Days in the Land of a Dying Illusion, the squashed social reality of communal life can inhibit necessary processes of individual self-reflection and understanding. Therefore, even as Matshoba’s fiction calls for black self-identification and emotional empathy, it demands a degree of intellectual work from readers: a space to muse over (and eventually decide on the ineluctable truth of) black oppression under apartheid in the manner exemplified by the examining, comparing, analyzing narrator. Brechtian estrangement techniques, it may be added, are not especially in vogue in South Africa at present.^{[28]The point about the ‘distancing’ of author from fictional material is made in Vaughan (1981b, 8). For an example of an eschewal of estrangement (and promotion of reader ‘entertainment’ and ‘involvement’) see Ndebele (1984, 25).}

Moreover, the accessibility of these stories is not always promoted through the register of language used, despite (again in line with Black Consciousness dictates) the occasional admixture of English, Xhosa and Afrikaans indicating township patois in recorded speech. Matshoba is fond of ‘terms’ – verbal quotes and other indicators of knowledge popular among better-educated township youth – sometimes harnessing Plato and Shakespeare to enhance his points; but exceeds this in a sporadic display of sophisticated and difficult language that sits ill with his desire to reach ordinary black readers. The ease with which words such as “braggadocio” (sic.), “mesdames” and “Regina belli”, are employed contradict the narrator’s expressed dislike of the manner in which English is used as a tool of social power and personal positioning in South Africa.^{[29]Critics have tended to read off Matshoba’s language usage in the work too simplistically (for example J. Williams [1992, 25, 28] and Chapman [1996, 374]). Of his reviewers only Obed Musi has indicated something of this problem (see his remarks about the word ‘Isle’ [1979]). For evidence around this point, compare the remarks about English usage in Matshoba 1979, 5, 99, 101, 110 with the language used in 4, 67, 76, 95, 128, 148.}

These criticisms do not imply that Matshoba’s short fiction of the late 1970s does not remain a fascinating, and rich, source for literary discussion and debate. However,

contemporary commonplaces in the academy regarding literary standards, aesthetics and the role of literature in society have served to deny Matshoba his rightful place in the history of the country’s literature.

As Shane Moran (1996) has pointed out in a recent article, there is evidence of a ‘New Hellenism’ at work in the South African literary academy which aims to transmute culture and art from its previously held combative and socially responsible priorities into a new posture of containment, principally through a reiteration of the values of artistic merit and individual sensibility. Despite its invocation of the politics of the post-modern, the tolerance of difference and multiple voices in the new South Africa appears to be in the process of being folded into an assumption of an underlying unity in the last instance, inscribed in terms of an aesthetics of harmony coupled with a social agenda of nation-building.

Dissonant elements within South African literary history are either being domesticated, or excluded. The latter has been the lot of Matshoba’s stories.

Even well-disposed critics from within the academy have generally tempered their appreciation of Matshoba with comments to the effect that his formal innovations might not be aesthetically self-conscious, and that they should be regarded by critics as synchronically and contextually – rather than formally – significant (see Chapman 1991, Maughan Brown 1985, 218; Vaughan 1982. 133). Such an inclination shows a patronising proclivity which is unfortunate. Rather, it seems opportune to stress once again the importance of Matshoba’s work as a marginal, anti-canonical expression of black experience, attuned to more than simply the “temporal demands of black experience in the 1970s,” as one critic would have it (Chapman 1996. 375). Even today his stories remain a reading experience which raises many questions about issues pertaining to the role of politics in fiction, writer commitment, narrative focalisation, and other crucial concerns.

This article was originally published in English in Africa 28 No.2 (October 2001): 1010-121. It is re-published in herri with kind permission of the author, and the Publications Manager of the Institute for the Study of the Englishes of Africa (ISEA), Dr. Carol Leff. English in Africa, founded in 1974, is a scholarly journal with a focus on original research on African writing in English.

The Editor invites contributions on all aspects of English writing and the English language in Africa, including oral traditions and other South African languages in translation. While English in Africa specialises in publishing previously unpublished or out-of-print literary materials, it also publishes scholarly articles, reviews and review articles, tributes, book reviews, and editorials. It places a particular emphasis on new or under-researched areas in African literature, and has tended to favour historical rather than theoretical modes of enquiry.

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