Adam Small
Our symposium is put out as a black-Afrikaans writers’ forum. I note a white presence, though, which is good. This use of “black” is an acknowledgement of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness.
Prof Van Wyk rightly points out (in a press interview) that, in this context, “black” is not a reference to skin colour, but instead indicates an ideological position of resistance to marginalisation. In this sense, even someone of whitest-white skin colour can be black! The symposium is also indicated as a matter of open discourse ( oop gesprek– reminiscent of Van Wyk Louw).
I have no qualm about the label “black”. Still, I have noted that (I quote Prof Van Wyk) “during and after the previous symposium there was criticism by some participants who felt that a movement away from such description was called for”.
Strangely, I miss specific reference in the programme to Kaaps. I say this, mindful that this form of Afrikaans, after all, has been the only novation in the language, against the background of which contemporary Afrikaans literature has unfolded. Together with this, I miss reference to the language’s discounting of poverty: perhaps it is considered an in-built theme, but special mention of it might have been helpful.
As far as Kaaps is concerned: the use of it dates far back to much longer than the 90 years some commentators now maintain to be the “age” of Afrikaans (since being declared an “official” language by Parliament). Coloured people have always been the largest number of Afrikaans-speakers. And there has always been an “archive of black-Afrikaans writing”.
Since the mention of poverty in the programme is not specific, I will devote considerable attention to it this morning. Two other topics I will touch on are (1) the important theme of biography, and (2) column-writing (“rubriekskrywing”) – these, I am acquainted with to the extent that I can speak meaningfully about them.
The concept “biography” aligns with the idea of the continuity of language: where it derives from, throughout time, into the future. The late Prof Gerwel noted my idea of history as a matter of biography: the confluence of biographies as a thoroughly human reality of the unfolding of a collective of individual lives. A language will shut down only when biography is not possible any longer.
As far as column-writing is concerned, my involvement at the moment is my writing of articles for the English press fortnightly and once a month for the Afrikaans press – there were also my similar contributions in the past. What is necessary, here, is that the black writer should make his presence felt in the media, and hope to find editors who do not prescribe to him what he should think and who do not “instruct” (him) on how to think. (I borrow the phrase from Marx Refuted, edited by Ronald Duncan and Colin Wilson.)
Such editorship, luckily, has always presented itself to black writers – even during the dark days of apartheid, with its white-dominated press: but this was a circumstance afforded not by the instances that the particular newspapers were, but by their open-minded individuals.
Fortunately, there are nearly always such persons in the environs of a not-so-free press. In passing, I also miss mention of letter-writing to the Afrikaans press.
The matter is important: I have experienced this censoring of proffered opinion, obviously considered undesirable, however pointed it might be.
One wonders just how heavy this censorship is. I turn, then, to the matter of poverty. A truly apt description of poverty is The Haunt of Misery(the title of a book compiled by Rojek, Peacock and Collins). Perhaps, however, the most appropriate description of this reality in literature is Dostoyevsky’s portrayal of the Marmeladov family, in the scene where Mrs Marmeladov and their daughter Sonja and other children wander through the streets.
My experience of poverty started long ago, in the time of my childhood in the Boland. When I was about five years old, I came to know my father as the lone schoolmaster to the children of the farm labourers in Goree, near Robertson. I describe this in my play The Orange Earth.
My father was also the spiritual mentor of the people there, as it was customary for a teacher in those surrounds, at that time. On Sundays, he preached in an old waenhuis (farm shed), made available by one of the white farmers, and when someone died, he would return the deceased’s body to the ground from whence it came, in the little graveyard across the gravel road, under the burning midday sun – always around three o’clock in the afternoon.
The favoured hymn sung was “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, Lord with me abide”. Today my experience of poverty is: at home, people who knock on my door each day, begging: “Even if only dry bread” (although they prefer some peanut-butter on a sandwich); or on the street, when Rosalie and I are outside, greeting the people as they pass; or meeting up with them in the shopping centre or, at times, also at the hospital or clinic.
Strong nerves are required to say and also to hear these words, about crime – murder, rape, destitution: people bloodied, often stabbed in the face: visages abhorrent like the nightmares painted by Jeroen Bosch. (Of course, it is not only the destitutely poor who are trapped in this whirlpool of evil – in fact, many of them are not.) There is, unbelievably, another face to this hell: ever so often the people are friendly, smile, and are thankful for what one does for them.
The impact is one of hope in the sense of Hebrews 11:1 that “to believe is to be sure of things we hope for, to be certain of things we cannot see”. Poverty is a many-faceted reality, not open to facile understanding. It grieves me to refer to the poor as “they” – but this is how we speak. What, then, of Afrikaans’s account of poverty? I delve, here, into my own writing.
When I encounter the people, wherever, they seem not to know, immediately, how to address me. They hesitate, calling me “Pa” (because of my grey hair); when I open my door for them, they are unfazed if I’m still in pajamas – they couldn’t care if I look somewhat dishevelled! They call my wife “madam” (I smile); and sometimes “mama”.
I also ask for people’s names, for without names no communication is possible: hence I know Kobus, and Clarence (the one whose need is so great, he appears to be absolutely nobody – a naamlose niemand!), and I knew Klaas and Gloria and Valerie – they are dead now – and children like Garren and Zera… Some would address me in English, even though their English is terribly bad, worse than my own. When they do speak Afrikaans, it is Kaaps.
It was my privilege, years ago, to give this name to this manner of speaking. Prof Gerwel commented that, like the name “Rainbow Nation” is Desmond Tutu’s making, “Kaaps” is Small’s creation for this variety of Afrikaans as a language (and he quotes me then) “which expresses the entire destiny of the people who speak it, one in which they utter their first cry in life, at birth, transact all the business of their life, and at death, ruckle their last breath”.
Poverty, of course, is not to be equated with the speaking of Kaaps. The anxiety that the Afrikaans language will disappear, is not warranted. In a world of computers, we may bear in mind that, should Afrikaans-speakers all expire, there will still be words of theirs on computer, which speakers of other languages could find there to decipher like some kind of hiëroglyphics. All in all, then, it is not so easy for a language to die.
A penultimate thought: the word “apartheid” also does not appear in the programme for today. Everything spoken of here happens against the backdrop of it. There are white Afrikaans writers, however – poets in particular – whose work shows no firm resentment of that evil regime. I would not expect all their work to be anti-apartheid directed, but some of it certainly. Novelists have fared better, in particular, Jan Rabie, whose writing evidences a true humanness – like that which Jesus’s earthly existence brought to the Godhead.
Such humanity will fade into oblivion only when, as the philosopher Heidegger, with keenest insight, says humankind forfeits its “place” on Earth – for to estreat one’s place in the world, is death.
Only when this happens would all life and language obliterate. It is really not easy at all, in today’s world, for a language to die.