Panel of experts explores historic context of SA’s best-loved writers

Colonialism and apartheid left South Africans alienated, socially disoriented and unable to accept responsibility for what happened in the past. This was one of the insights shared during a panel discussion on the speakers programme at the Bathurst Book Fair recently.

Dr Patricia Henderson, facilitator Professor Monty Roodt and Dr Andy Manson during a panel discussion looking into the South African zeitgeist through the lens of literature at the Pig and Whistle lounge at the Bathurst Bookfair. Picture: FAITH QINGA

Looking at the spirit of the times through the lens of South African literature in the lounge at the Historic Pig and Whistle Inn were anthropologist Dr Patricia Henderson and historian Dr Andy Manson. Author, novelist and emeritus professor of Sociology Monty Roodt facilitated the conversation.

Manson’s whose research field is Southern Tswana history. He started the session by exploring books that capture the essence of the Southern Tswana region and represent important milestones in the historiography of South Africa.

He talked about the Boer war diary of Sol Plaatje – ‘An African at Mafikeng’. It is an account of the experience of the famous siege of Mafikeng through Barolong eyes. Plaatje was a court interpreter, journalist, diarist and later politician-founder member of the African National Congress. Manson revealed that Plaatje had translated Shakespeare into Setswana. “From the diary it becomes apparent that Africans were as much involved in the conflict as the Brits and Boers,” he said.

The Barolong were reduced to poverty during the siege and British commander Lord Baden Powell played down their role to emphasise his own. The discovery of Plaatje’s diary by John Comaroff   in the late 1970s had changed the way historians saw the war.

“It was no longer a white man’s war but one that included black people. Now we call it the South African war,” Manson said.

SM Molema Montshiwa, Barolong Chief from 1815 to 1896 was an extraordinary man, Manson revealed.

Molema, a medical doctor who graduated from Glasgow University, was also a founder member of the ANC. “Molema wrote biographies of two major 19th century Barolong Dikgosi (chiefs) to highlight their skills of adaption, innovation and resistance,” Manson told the audience. “Most of the important African leaders of that time – including Tswana leaders – were therefore put on the map.”

Molema had conducted the research in his spare time. It included official sources and oral accounts from the Barolong themselves.

Manson went on to talk about Nancy Jacobs’ Environment, Power and Injustice, A South African History.

The book offered one of the first detailed accounts of the way non-capitalist societies, in this case the Tlhaping, living in today’s Kuruman district, understood and interacted with the environment.  

Charles van Onselen’s ‘The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894-1985’ had taken 15 years to write. Manson said the book proved once and for all the value of oral histories.

“Its exploration of sharecropping as a means of survival mirrors the phenomenon in the US,”| he said. “For example it shows that relationship between Afrikaners and blacks was [also] one of give and take and not one of constant friction,” he explained.

‘The seed is mine’ was significant because it introduced the concept of cultural osmosis, showing how the Tswana-speakers and the Afrikaners absorbed each other’s cultural features.

Henderson focused on biographer Lyndall Gordon’s book Outsiders, an account of five women who changed the world.

South African author Olive Schreiner is one of them.

“Olive Schreiner was not a conventional women in any degree. She was brought up in extreme poverty. Her parents were German missionaries and by the age of 12, she could no longer be looked after by her parents because they were too poor,” Henderson told the audience. 

The anthropologist covered the early part of Schreiner’s life. Schreiner became a governess in the Cradock region at an early age. She was completely self-educated and read prominent figures from that era such as the famous economist, John Stuart Mill and famous evolutionists, Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. 

Schreiner had drawn from Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary thinking. “Her complex way of thinking is all about trying to dissolve the divisions and the boundaries that existed in colonial South Africa, including the very narrow parameters in which women were supposed to live at the time,” Henderson said.

An extract from the radical ‘Man to Man’ demonstrated Schreiner’s knowledge of local plants, including the thicket that grows in Bathurst.

One the one hand, the book was about the character’s descent into prostitution; on the other hand it was about her sister who regarded her marriage as another form of prostitution. The book highlighted Schreiner’s preoccupation with the narrow parameters in which women were expected to live in those days.

JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) cleverly distanced South African readers from the situation that confronted the country at the time, Henderson said. It was still relevant, she said.

“Very few of us tend to cross boundaries and really understand other people’s culture and way of looking at the world,” Henderson said. “We have retreated into our ethnic enclaves far too rapidly in my view.”

Roodt elaborated by referring to Coetzee’s Disgrace. He found the extremely pessimistic view of nature interesting. “One of the things that come through so strongly is how the impact of the colonial and apartheid experience leaves people completely alienated and anomic and unable to accept responsibility for what happened in the past,” he said.