KOPANO RATELE

Founder member of the Staffrider literary and art journal, short story writer, film script writer and script editor, Mtutuzeli Matshoba is among South Africa’ s select literary activists who through their writing, despite the draconian censorship system of the 70s and 80s, were able to address the social problems caused by racial discrimination in all areas of South African life. His collection of short stories on urban black experiences in the 70s, Call Me Not A Man was published in 1978 and was followed by Seeds of War, a novella on forced removals that won the Pringle Award for Creative Writing in 1980. 

The “Mtutu” in the title of this article is a fictional character in one of Mtutuzeli Matshoba’s stories. With this character, Matshoba sought to make us empathise with not just Mtutu’s disgrace at the hands of the white politico-economic structure but the subjection of black people in general; indeed, to rage against the inferiorities power is capable of causing a people to experience. Given Matshoba and other earlier writers’ interventions in respect of African interiority, one way of starting off is by asking whether we now know more about the black inner world, and also whether, in fact, there ever was such a world waiting to be rediscovered; a world that psychology has missed, overlooked, or treated too lightly?

In other words, what is it that we did not know before, and with the help of Matshoba’s Mtutu, can at present make claims about with increased certainty; about what ‘the Bantu’ felt and thought regarding herself against a history of an anti-black capitalist patriarchal social structure?

That the policy of separate development and the ideology of white supremacy had certain fundamentally unfavourable effects on the forms of black people’s affective, cognitive, motivational, relational and cultural lives is a reasonable claim to make. Unless one’s approach to African life is coloured by a certain kind of politics and ethics, to assert that apartheid affected black people negatively is something that readily makes sense.

Indeed, unless one starts out with certain epistemic, ethnocentric and class biases in studying life in black communities, it ought to be hard to escape the fact that colonialism and apartheid were bent on inventing a certain African world – while these structures were, simultaneously, set on distorting extant ontological and cultural realities and practices of Africans. I take the measure of reasonableness further to mean that, of course, Africans did not have to read that many black people lived in poverty, in sparse small brick houses or in shacks; nor that black people knew racism but still might have shared and laughed when talking of the banal humiliations at the hands of their white masters, madams, police officers, and the strangeness of the white world; nor that being black a person grew up with people who got gaoled and others murdered by the white regime’s forces for daring to fight for a semblance of a ‘normal’ life.

Still, there are storytellers, like Matshoba, who wrote of some of the effects of racism on black subjectivities and intimate life^{[1] (see, e.g., Abrahams, 1946/1976; Gordimer, 1984; La Guma, 1991; Nkosi, 1987; Peteni, 1976; Plaatjie, 1930/1978; Tlali, 1979)} . Late in the twentieth century, there also emerged a small group of progressive scholars who showed in varying ways this same fact: that colonial and apartheid arrangements had adverse consequences on what we feel and do not feel, and what we think and what we do not, about others as well as about ourselves^{[2] (see, e.g., Bulhan, 1985; Butchart, 1998; Dawes and Donald, 1994; de la Rey, Duncan, Shefer, & van Niekerk, 1997; Duncan, van Niekerk, de la Rey & Seedat, 2001; Foster, 1991; Mama, 1995; Nicholas, 1993)} .

It goes without saying that socio-political and economic arrangements in the colony and under apartheid overlapped with local and global capital structures: an unequal relation, as is known, always mimics other inequalities, though never in a simple nor straightforward manner; racial hierarchies rework class structures; gender inequalities are entwined with economic disparities; discrimination based on sexual orientation goes back to the same source of power as other kinds of discrimination; and geopolitical resource disparities overlap with other forms of disparities^{[3] (see Fanon, 1986, for a version of this mimicry)} .

However, one could be asked why state such unremarkable claims, for it is only to prejudiced scholarship that it is not blindingly clear that the orders of inequality that black people were socialised into, and against, have infected their thoughts and bodies, restructured their inner worlds, and influenced their relations with one another?

Firstly, while the claims have come to be taken for granted, what is still far from certain is whether it is clear as to what the complex trajectories, character, meanings, and possible futures of these effects are. Secondly, it seems that we shall never be as confident as we could be about the routes the processes of racial and ethnic differentiation and identification follow in refiguring what one learns to find offensive until we have studied the structures of one’s emotions, relations, thoughts and motivations against the backdrop of the histories, plots, rules and designs of racial separation and white power. Thirdly, it appears that more work needs to be done about what our guts find objectionable, why our soul finds some things unnatural, what we feel to be perverted. There is a great deal of research and theoretical study that is called for around what is thought of as desirable and pleasurable, or immoral and pathological. Finally, in seeking to comprehend the modulations and methods of colonial and segregationist arrangements, as Valentin Mudimbe (1988) has averred, our tools have to be trained not just at land and economic relations but at what can reasonably be expected from psychology, ever at the ready to domesticate and rewrite the interior worlds of the black.

While one of the intentions of this article is to continue the project of playing with such racial tropes as ‘the mind of the Bantu’ or ‘African personality’, on the one hand (as, of course, the black, the native, the Bantu, being exteriority, does not have an interior life; and an anterior, more important point is that there is nothing like the African, the black), it simultaneously gets on with the much-needed efforts of building comprehension about the unwritten psychologies by which some sections of the populace live. I should indicate that though there is little on the subject of the interior lives of African people to be found in psychology (and again one must recognise that the discipline has been less than diligent in its dealings with the subject of blackness), there is no a priori native world for which I am arguing.

The questions posed in this article are: if apartheid and colonialism did mangle our other, hidden, and for the sake of argument, more ‘real’ selves, how was this done and how certain are we that these regimes recast us into things we are not naturally, in other words, that we would have been different beings if it were not for their machinations?

Still, why, if all this rings true, did we allow their superiorities and hatreds into our hearts and minds; in other words, how complicit are we in its objectifications, exoticisms, hatreds and fetishes? Additionally, having danced at the death of apartheid, how long can we go on holding it culpable for our reactions when we feel our bodies fill with anxiety on seeing ourselves being looked at by others, or when we get excited on witnessing one of ‘us’ bloodying the face of one of ‘them’?

The purpose of these questions is primarily to search for places where we can find ways to understand African interiorities and, at the same time, to try to comprehend their configurations, pasts and promises. This is done by focusing on sexuality and nearby bodies, but more widely (yet more acutely) on intimacy, in its relation to racial oppression and domination. In other words, the object is to find out how we felt, thought about, and ‘did’ intimacy in a white male-ruled world, as much as trying to find where to go to find out about the unseen lives of Africans.

FICTIONS ON LIFE INSIDE AFRICANS

In looking at black life in the colony and under apartheid, one might speculate that a black man or woman was not always afforded the chances (by, ironically, both white power as well as by other blacks) to live as a person, that is, to live an ordinary, idiosyncratic, if not, of course, free life. By this I also mean that rather than having opportunities to grow and have a full and complex inner life, black people might have felt compelled to live out their lives in the dark, like phantoms, after Ralph Ellison’s (1952/1965) characterisation of ‘Negroes’ in Jim Crow America.

At the same time, here in this country, as in the United States of America, black people were obliged to live a good part of their lives front-stage, as workers (Ratele, 2003). This phantom life lived in public meant that a black person was likely to be found violently oscillating between hyper-visibility and invisibility (see Franklin, 1999; Williams, 1988).

The assumption, however, begs the question whether African people did not have a life outside of the clutches of white capital and a raced society. One obvious answer is that, of course, there was a life. Another response that can be posited is that, of course, there was a life but from the point of view of the discipline of psychology, we cannot say much about it, as this is one other area where the discipline continues to under-achieve.

If there is a hypothesis guiding this article it is that even if there was ‘a life inside’ blacks, a world that can be shown to have developed outside of patriarchal racialised economic power, it was likely to be characterised by a limited set of tropes of relating or of being that global racial capital power provokes and the policy of segregated development elaborates in the first place. The Empire and Afrikaner Nationalist rule induced or coerced black people to develop stereotypical and simultaneously divergent ways of behaving for different publics (see DuBois, 1903/1996): one set of behaviours would be for the outside, white world, and another, and it might be argued, ‘authentic’, set of practices for home, the insiders.

Mostly because of the violence that underwrites their lives in colonial and racist settings, there is an argument to be made that African women and men learn to turn their existences inside out.

In an anti-African world, Africans learn to live a good deal of their lives outside – on the surface of their skins, outside their bodies and heads, outside their homes, on the streets, in shebeens, in suburban kitchens – and ending up at times believing that this is all there can be to it. A possible result of a life produced under these conditions is, as we see from the description of intimacy that follows, one not characterised by warmth, self-love, being close or opening up to another, but more likely their opposites.

One of the obvious implications of such a hypothesis is that were local psychologists to turn some of their tools towards the inner life of Africans, their explorations would have to go further than where available investigations tend to stop. For one thing, such explorations would set out to comprehend the likelihood, paths and character of what Benigni (1998) tried to do in La vita e bella. What the director sought to do with that film was to offer us both the ever-present need for a beautiful life, as well as questions of what, under inhuman conditions, such a life might look like. It appears somewhat important for psychology to help us understand this possibility: of a full, creative, but not politically abstruse or unethical existence in a capitalist anti-black misogynistic world. There is therefore a need to look into how people can live better against a history and dominant culture that warps their structures of feeling, being and relating.

As suggested, the routes to how to do this, and in particular to thinking our way into the interior space of Africans, are for the most part underdeveloped. There is very little pertinent local research or creative theoretical literature on the subject of how Africans made sense of their lives under and against apartheid (however, see Manganyi, 1991). It is for this reason that we have to set out deliberately to find whether others outside the discipline have done work on the topic. This step is also intended to undermine the looting raids on everyday life, oral stories, imaginative literature, popular culture, and other resources that mainstream social science conducts, before repackaging and selling back to the general society their scientific facts and insights (see Hook, 2001; Parker, 1999).

Critical intellectuals have to borrow where they can, but ought to acknowledge their debts and pay them (see Holdstock, 1981). As for the edge of this move, it lies in another underlying argument: that psychologists produce and circulate their own brand of fictions all the time. The sources this article seeks to persuade the reader to consider as both rich and legitimate in trying to understand our interior lives include popular culture, film, television and radio dramas, advertisements, music, poetry, novels and short stories. It is on fiction writing that we concentrate.

In turning to fiction though, Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera points out that any effort such as the current one is likely to lead to disappointment, as African fiction has tended to concern itself with spectacle and social life, as opposed to subjective worlds, a criticism that Njabulo Ndebele (1991) has also made.

Talking to Carita Backström (2001) Vera is said to have commented that [the books she writes]

are very much explorations of internal, psychological worlds and intimate portrayals of . . . characters. This is something which I always thought was lacking in African writing, that we are not taking the internal worlds of our characters seriously, that we are not exploring that . . . I have not read a book that really took seriously the psychological profile of an African character. If imaginative literature does not take the internal worlds of Africans seriously we might be in worse trouble than we thought.

However, perhaps Vera is excessively harsh. Some writers from Zimbabwe and South Africa, as well as all over the continent have tried to explore these subjects in their work. In Zimbabwe mention can be made of Chenjerai Hove, the feminist novelist, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and the anarchist, Dambudzo Marechera. From South Africa, offerings on black intimate life include K. Sello Duikers’ Quiet violence of dreams, special for being one of the few novels by a black writer to explore gay life in an explicit fashion, and Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela. Going into our pasts, one finds a host of writers, with the short story form in particular, who have tried to portray the intimate lives of their characters. But before getting on to fiction about African lives, let us take a look at what intimacy is thought to be.

INTIMACY

There are varying descriptions of the concept intimacy. There is also much that is common among them. One of the common elements in the definitions of intimacy is that it is at times employed as a synonym for sexual intercourse. For instance, the Heritage illustrated dictionary of the English language states that, in plural form (intimacies), the term refers to ‘illicit sexual intercourse’ (Morris, 1975; see also Brown, 1993). In addition, and of at least equal weight, is the fact that intimacy is taken to refer to being marked by close acquaintance, association, or familiarity; pertaining to one’s deepest nature; what is essential or innermost to oneself; characterised by informality and privacy; very personal, private and secret (Morris, 1975, p. 686). The new Shorter Oxford English dictionary states that it refers to close familiarity or union, an innermost nature or inward quality (Brown, 1993).

The Collins English dictionary and thesaurus (CEDT) similarly defines the term as meaning close or warm friendship or understanding, personal relationships, and as a euphemism for sexual relations (2000, p. 626). In addition to these, the CEDT gives the meaning for the adjective as deeply personal, private, or secret and having deep or unusual knowledge. It gives familiarity as the core synonym, followed by closeness, confidence, confidentiality, fraternisation and understanding. As suggested, the idea of intimacy is seen as opposed to that of alienation, aloofness, coldness, detachment, distance, estrangement, remoteness and separation. The Concise Oxford thesaurus identifies the core synonyms for intimacy as closeness and sexual relations. In addition, it provides the following synonyms for the former: togetherness, affinity, rapport, attachment, familiarity, amity, affection, warmth and others; and for the latter, sexual intercourse, sex, lovemaking, copulation and coitus (Waite, 2002).

Scholars of intimacy are also not in total agreement about the meaning of the concept, but there is common ground to be found in their definitions. The concept is seen as referring to the ability to make a strong commitment to others, which is a description that harks back to Erikson, and thus constructs intimacy as related to a strong sense of personal identity and as opposed to isolation (Davis & Palladino, 1997). Other authors define it as a dimension of love, which refers to how well one can talk to and confide in one’s partner (Kalat, 1996); a relation involving strong emotional attachment and personal commitment (Sdorow, 1993); and experiencing the essence of oneself in intense relationships with others (Cox, 1987). In spite of the disagreements then, most descriptions of intimacy refer to a number of common elements: mutual and reciprocal interaction; feelings of shared commitment and cohesion; in-depth physical, emotional and cognitive awareness of, and expressiveness towards, someone; self-disclosure; and a generalised sense of closeness, bondedness and connectedness, amongst others^{[4] (see also Jamieson, 1998; Moss & Schwebel, 1993; Prager, 1995)} .

Taken together, the above descriptions reveal that just as intimacy can be understood to refer to what happens between individuals, it can also be understood as something that a person interiorises. The implications of this double meaning are important. Intimacy is not only a way of relating to others. It is simultaneously a way of comprehending relationships in the world and acting on them, a language that an individual takes in and which, in turn, shapes her or him. This last kind of intimacy is what might be called an intimacy of self; in other words, self-knowledge. It comes close to being redundant to speak of an intimacy of self because the latter concept, like intimacy, refers, inter alia, to an individual’s innermost life.

Whereas intimacy is commonly understood as what happens in a sexual love relationship, or between friends or spouses, intimacy of self refers to how one comes to be aware of and know oneself.

Parenthetically, a person’s innermost life is also what at some juncture in history and in some cultures might be termed soul. When psychology is defined in an outmoded way (see Billig, 1996) and taken, for example, to mean the study of consciousness or experience, rather than strictly individual behaviour, the relation of intimacy to soul, which we elaborate below, is easy to apprehend. More critically, the close relationship between the soul or psyche and intimacy further suggests that a psychology that cannot come to terms with people’s inner world, which is purportedly its subject, is at best performing below par. However, even if psychologists continue to be married to the idea of the discipline as concerned with studying behavioural data or cognitive processes, would we not want it to be serious about a person’s relationships to others as well as to himself or herself? And does it not open up investigative possibilities to situate these relationships within a culture and society?

CONTEXTS OF INTIMACY

It can be shown that generally, for heterosexual men, to talk of intimacy is to speak of bodies of women and not men, and for Europeans of Europeans and not Africans; that affective and motivational lives are always speaking of particularities, of the lives of young people or the elderly, of the middle classes but not poor people; that is also to say, knowledge of relating and constituting oneself emerging out of particular cultural, political and economic historical junctures.

Requiring further emphasis in this understanding of intimacy are the elements that are highlighted as important, for some of these elements tend to lie on the blind side of psychology, beyond the analytical or therapeutic work that is supposed to help in cultivating psychological insight into our lives. This is so because such understanding is facilitated by, among other things, what might be called the external coordinates of inner life. These coordinates are what circumscribe how people get to know and relate to others as well as to themselves; part of economic, cultural and political structures that define and track people’s personal lives. This last point, of course, points to the fact that it is a grossly individualist psychology that has tried to explain our emotional, mental, and physical health in isolation from the larger context of society (see Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, 1998).

A human being’s interior life is produced in relation not just to other human beings, but also within a universe of insensate facts, practices, and entities that include livelihoods, images of goods that persons see in magazines, on television and billboards; in the context of the church, schools, clubs and ‘societies’ they belong to; with conditions defined by the state, laws, policies, and political organisations of which they are members. All these shape in several and at times clashing ways how individuals develop their interior worlds and engage in intimacy. For example, consider how household size, living conditions and income levels might have an impact on psychosocial and physical health, thus affecting the ways in which we are enabled to ‘do’, or impeded from, ‘doing’ intimacy?

Generally speaking, it is said that smaller families, with adequate space, are conducive to the development of emotional and mental health. Given this understanding, one is left to wonder what sort of intimacy is possible, produced, and played out in the 1.8 million African households in which there is only one room to live and sleep (Statistics South Africa, 2003). And for the more than 1.3 million poor households who have more than seven or more members, developing intimacy is likely to be more difficult than for those from better-off, smaller households. There is also an increased probability that the development of intimacy is negatively affected by living in sub-standard conditions and unemployment. Here it is worth noting that more than 1.7 million African people live in shacks or informal dwellings, either in someone else’s backyard or in ‘squatter camps’. According to the Labour Force Survey of 2001, 47.1% of Africans are not economically active. Census 2001 puts the figure of the unemployed close to 3 in every 10 (Statistics South Africa, 2003).

The fact that our interior lives are formed and intimacy takes place in the context of politics and the economy is applicable to every member of society. The materials each is afforded to work with mean that the forms interiority takes, and how our sexual and bodily lives shape up can differ radically between people.

In other words, although power structures the territory within which we all work out our interests, pleasures and phobias, the crowded physical and social space applies only to those who have limited access to material resources. The point here is that to know what the individual desires or is revolted by, he or she has to recognise it first. For an individual from a poor family, the opportunity to know himself or herself well – and if he or she does not particularly admire what he or she learns about himself or herself, to find time and change it – is relatively more restricted than for somebody from a middle-class family.

In an anti-black market-driven world, it is more likely to be a middle-class white person rather than an African who is afforded the time and latitude to negotiate the snares of the dominant culture and work out their fears, tastes, revulsions, and interest – though this does not mean that whites are better adjusted psychically, emotionally smarter, or have better relationships than black people: the opposite could in fact be truer. What global capitalist culture does to poor people, white power did to black people, with something about the latter found in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s submission that ‘South Africa’s history of repression and exploitation affected the mental well-being of the majority of its citizens’ (1998, p. 127).

SOUL IN POLITICS AND SCIENCE

Intimacy has been described as overlapping the soul, and this notion is referred to in several instances above. To speak of a soul to people who aspire to a world that runs along rational laws is not advisable: words like that can be indulged for a while; repeating them more than a few times though could be regarded as backward; not just unscientific but primitive. However, scientificity is a pretension that is too dear to engage in, if by science it is meant the objectification of humans found in mainstream psychology (see Holzman & Morss, 2000; Kvale, 1992). In any event, in the scientistic demeanour of mainstream social science, the soul is something some of us might tend to shy away from; if we have dealings with it, the general preference is not to do so in public.

The notion of soul still has currency in certain cultures though: many people talk about the soul freely, the soul being to them as real as the body. Perhaps it helps to note the historical importance of the soul to Western philosophical traditions in making the case for talking about this entity. Juxtaposing the body with the soul, René Descartes argued strongly for the distinctiveness, certainty and indeed superiority of the soul when put next to the body. For the father of Enlightenment, the soul was the only certainty after God.

It is important to note that beyond the presence of the soul in historical and contemporary philosophy and social, political and scientific life, what is also significant is that it is frequently equated with both mental and emotional events, self and consciousness. In his translation of the Discourse on method and the meditations, Sutcliffe (1968) also equates the soul or mind that Descartes writes of not just to consciousness but also explicitly to the self.

A number of radical scholars have also spoken of the fact that despite the apparent rejection of the soul by the contemporary scientific community and secular modern society, it remains deeply ingrained in the texture of scientific practice as well as in political arrangements and everyday life. Departing from Michel Foucault’s analyses, Nicholas Rose (1989), for instance, has shown that the human soul has perhaps always been an immediate subject of power, arguing that in recent times the soul itself has entered directly into politics and government. Foucault (1986) himself, of course, devotes attention to the matter in, for example, his work on the care of the self. There he shows that socio-medical sciences have always found a part for the soul to play in the scheme of things. (Foucault, of course, pays attention to earlier philosophers, the Greeks, Rufus, Galen and Artemidorus, to trace the routes by which the soul comes into contemporary scientific, social and political life.)

However, for us, drawing attention to the soul has to do with the fact that apartheid policies were not just about keeping black people disenfranchised; nor were they merely about separate entrances for different ‘race’ groups and sub-standard toilets and second-rate buses for non-whites. For one, the policy framework of racial separation and inequality sought to decide where and how, as native, you lived, what, as a Bantu, you did at school and how far you went with it, and if it did not entirely decide whom and how you loved, it made sure from which ‘population or ethnic groups’ your friends were likely to come and from what group you would marry lawfully. Apartheid rule, or those who worked for it, gave many African individuals not just the names (such as Peter and Petrus) they carried in their passes: as an apt colloquialism has it, it made sure that lessons in inferiority and baasskap (mastery) got under their skin, into their heads and hearts, their eyes and ears and other senses. In other words, colonial and apartheid politics were meant to determine the many little things we are falteringly learning to take for granted as well as the major questions of existence. Racism and capitalist power wanted nothing less than souls: to produce them, or where an African had escaped them, disable and hush her or him up, turn them, reorder their world, or everything else failing, eliminate them.

It is worth noting here that many researchers and theorists on the colony, apartheid, and post-apartheid relations remain unprovoked by the effect of these arrangements on questions of self and relational life. It is especially when studying matters such as social life and interpersonal relations, but also other relations such as motherhood, family, friendship and childhood, that we are impelled to demonstrate how these phenomena are related to existential regimes and the iconicity of ‘race’.

KNOWING ONE ANOTHER

Mtutu, as noted at the beginning of this article, is a character in To Kill a Man’s pride, a short story by the Soweto writer, Matshoba. Matshoba is one of the group of writers of the 1970s and 1980s that included Sydney Sipho Sepamla, Ahmed Essop, Miriam Tlali, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane, Mongane Wally Serote, Mafika Pascal Gwala and others; a group sometimes disparagingly referred to as struggle or protest writers, who tried to focus our attention on the nightmarish quality of the day-to-day lives of black people before the advent of democracy. Like his creator, Mtutu lives in a township erected by apartheid planners on the outskirts of a white city where, like other black men and women, he is supposed to make his way daily in order to make his labour available if he is to make an honest living. In describing Mtutu’s life, Matshoba wished to fictionalise the shame apartheid set out to inject into black individuals’ bodies, psyches and their relations to themselves and one another, as well as putting before his readers the incredible designs African people were forced to draw in their efforts to have ‘normal lives’.

Matshoba returns to the themes of disgrace, a society gone mad, and psychosocial death on several occasions.

In the story, Call Me Not a Man, for instance, which is about another character, the writer puts before us a litany of everyday humiliations and a complicated life early on that makes you want to protest or laugh out loud, cry, vomit or strike out:

Similarly, To kill a Man’s Pride tells a tale of the labour conditions of black workers, life in hostels and other mundane violences of life under apartheid. In the extract below, Mtutu describes the familiar wretchedness of ‘80 Albert Street’, the pass-office:

One of the things from this extract that strikes one is the realisation that it is possible for there to be (a form of) ‘intimacy’ without attachment, connectedness, warmth or reciprocity (see CEDT, 2000; Prager, 1995; Waite, 2002). It is possible for people to relate to one another and live together without one or both being present in the encounter – in a certain sense, apartheid. Mtutu and the other black men have to show their private parts to another man in order to be permitted the right to work. In other words, their private parts are not private. White power and capitalism, with the help of the cover story provided by science, have a right to black bodies and do not care about what those whose bodies they are feel or think.

Another point that strikes us is the pretense that must be maintained between African men, and between them and African women, if a semblance of self-respect and respect for one another is to be possible, a theme that is also clear in the earlier quotation. For the men and women in Matshoba’s story to have an inner life, white society made it necessary to hide part of themselves from one another, even though they knew the parts that could not be spoken of. This is not a problem ‘the young white ladies’ had to deal with, the clicking heels of their shoes letting one know that they knew, as well as the fact that stories about bits of black bodies went around the office.

There is, in this last story, therefore, a strange relation of being, of relating, of looking and being looked at. One man takes out his penis for another man to look at. It is neither to be adored for its beauty, shape, length, thickness, or any other quality we can think genitals might possess.

Neither is this act part of getting ready to have intimate physical relations. The white man whose work it is to look at the other men’s private parts is portrayed as doing his duty without a sense of shame – or admiration, though there is a feeling of dishonour and disgrace on the part of the black men – a feeling that should have incited the beholder to say to himself: ‘Am I not seeing too much here? Am I not violating a basic relation between two beings?’

What Matshoba shows is thus what pornography is essentially about: an absence of closeness and affection, precisely where one would expect to find intimacy.

Having recognised what Matshoba is trying to do and having experienced the rage that he is trying to evoke, it is precisely this very recognition and experience that leads us to want to read Matshoba one more time. Specifically, we must try to find out whether the characters are only reduced by the proceedings at the labour bureau, or if this is also an effect of characters not being fully drawn by their author? On rereading, but also given what was said in the introductory part of the article, the first is clear: colonial and apartheid structures were likely to reduce African life, and, it seems, to a differing degree, did something similar to white life.

There was no need to have full persons under these regimes, people who were both good and bad – government officials who would rather quit the public service than be the instruments of humiliation for others – as there are no fully developed characters in the stories, evinced by the animal and hunting imagery: bolting, captors, a face like an owl.

However, we also get drawn by something about Matshoba’s writing of African lives. In Call Me Not a Man, for instance, there is no escaping how the writer conflates the fact of subjugation with its experience. It is not true: the other man’s life is not the narrator’s life. Yet, he says he knows it, this life of the other man. So how does he know?

For he is African, that is the answer; a black person will know. Is this not the same thing that apartheid, colonialism, racism and capital do though – flatten our varied experiences of blackness, serfdom, kaffirdom and poverty, thus denying us contradictory, multi-layered, changing, emotional and mental lives?

This knowingness is in fact a very central part of the violence that structures African people’s life, a way of knowing others that refuses them ordinariness, that is, a life underneath the public one, interiority.

In Matshoba’s stories the main shortcoming is then that he does not do enough to separate the experience of being oppressed from the fact of the political and economic structures of oppression. To put it in another way, in To kill a man’s pride, Mtutu’s experience of social and psychic death is treated, as the character in Call me not a Man intimates, as the experience of all black males. One of the things that alerts the reader to this: To kill a man’s pride is the refusal of the writer to name his main character.

However, this may be said to be artistic provocation and not really central to the story. If it is, it is a flat-footed way to stir things up, for it comes across as an inability to create distance, perhaps to imagine another life different from one’s own. This gauche posture becomes especially visible when we get to see the writer’s characterisation of women. Here it is important to note that the two stories are not just about men’s experiences. Perhaps of greater significance is the fact that Matshoba makes all African people’s lives men’s experiences. It might be said though, because of the male-centred view of his work, not in spite of it, Matshoba has enabled us to imagine how horrible black women’s lives were if their men suffered thus. But this will not do. The stories are about men and men’s battles, hurts, and identities. They tell us little about women and women’s worlds. If what is to be understood is a woman’s intimate life, the stories have almost nothing to offer. Women at best are quiet presences; otherwise they are observers of the abjection their men folk are subjected to; they are swear words directed at men; they are fodder in African men’s war against the rulers and their henchmen, called ‘to get amorous with captors’. It is false that the experience of the men of the ‘race’ is the experience of the ‘race’. It is only with the help of feminism that we are incited to read these concealed but stacked objectifications of black women.

However, it is true that African men and women were all at one time subject to the same laws. Consider the influx control laws for instance. It is a well-known fact that the legislation was meant to keep South Africa white, entrenching the separation of whites from Bantu and other aliens while keeping a steady supply of cheap labour, a fact that Matshoba’s stories centralise. And so, one might mention that in the year in which the edition of the story from which the latter extract comes was published, 1980, 30 782 African men and 7 063 African women had been arrested by the South African Police and the ‘blackjacks’ (officials of the Black Administration Boards) for infractions of pass and influx control laws in and around Johannesburg and Soweto, which Matshoba, like his character, would have regarded as ‘home’, in spite of the law.

The total number of Africans arrested in the country for not carrying a dompas and for being in a white and wrong place under these laws, was over 81 000 that year. In the previous year, the total number arrested under these laws was 120 000, more than 20 000 of whom were women. Pass law offenders accounted on average for two-fifths of the prison population in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s. The Southern African Labour Development and Research Unit reported that pass laws led to the removal of a total of 2 million African men and women from white South Africa to the homelands, such that between 1960 and 1980 the population of these places had risen by 14%. In addition to this short history of the role of pass laws in disciplining black people and encouraging them to keep away from whites, white spaces and white bodies, influx laws were also employed to halt and reverse the process of African urbanisation (see Gordon, 1981; Horrel, 1982). 

In other words, the passes were used to stop the development of Africans, not merely separate them from whites. The legislation was a mechanism used to deny Africans self-determination and self-respect. Being part of the regime of inequality, pass laws were intended to frustrate any black effort to grow and live a fully human modern life.

In attempting to reveal the interior life of black people, the stories by Matshoba, like all fictional work, including psychological fictions, hold one final meaning for us. Regardless of their weaknesses, these stories, like ‘stories’ taught to psychology students, come to constitute us, being part of our sociopolitical and personal inheritance. What this means is that in trying to trace black life, the story and its author come to figure in how we think of our bodily and sexual practices, relational lives and identifications. The stories we hear, read, and get to learn form part of the languages, strategies, and interpretive repertoires that we come to employ in constructing who we believe we are and who others are. In fictionalising the social reality of apartheid, Matshoba has for better or worse helped to shape what we have become, getting involved in our lives and in how we relate to ourselves, to one another, and in our struggles with inequalities.

CONCLUSION

If the assumption that racism and global capitalist culture have an abiding interest in people’s intimate lives is reasonable, what makes little sense is why African scholars have not sought to make us understand much more clearly the intricacies and paths of colonial and apartheid policy makers’ curiosity in interiority and private relations. Might it be that this is not that important, not as a public issue; that we have to focus for a little while longer on the more important questions of basic needs, poverty, unemployment, water, health, housing, land, electricity and the general imperative to transform society? There must be doubt, insofar as there appears to be an incomprehensible lack of interest by African psychologists, and social scientists in general, outside of feminist dialogues, in exploring this side of colonial and white power (however, see for example, Manganyi, 1973).

I believe it is critical that we seek to understand the histories of our relations and interiors, and that includes our emotional worlds, motivational lives, and personal relations to one another. Intimacy is too important to ignore.

Women’s struggles around the world have long let us understand that the personal is bound to the political. And so intimacy, as we have tried to show, is more than a simple personal relation, developing as it does out of the grid of sociopolitical and economic power. Seeking to understand intimacy must form part of the effort to change male practices, men’s and women’s relations to their bodies and to others’ bodies, of women’s reproductive and other needs, of children’s health and other needs, let alone the nation’s needs. It is critical that we seek to understand ourselves, and that includes our emotional and mental worlds and psychological relations to one another in the context of a racist world.

The article was first published by the Department of Psychology, University of the Western Cape. © Psychological Society of South Africa. All rights reserved. South African Journal of Psychology, 35(3) 2005, pp. 555–574. ISSN 0081-2463.