South Africa

Anyone who has traveled in South Africa and talked politics with people has heard something along this lines: This country is just like Rhodesia, and under black rule we’re going to turn into Zimbabwe. This sort of “When We” alarmism, equal parts racist tripe and romanticized fatuousness is also common among expats around the world and among former colonialists of a certain age. It was thus refreshing to see that Jeremy Cronin, in his Chris Hani Memorial Lecture, addressed this question directly. One need not ardently support the South African Communist Party (I do not) to find a great deal of merit in Cronin’s cogent argument that whatever South Africa’s problems, it is not likely to follow the path of Zimbabwe.

[Cross-posted at the FPA Africa Blog.]

The Chronicle Review of the Chronicle of Higher Education has a lengthy feature on Chinua Achebe and his now fifty-year-old classic Things Fall Apart.

This weekend’s New York Times Sunday Book Review features two of South Africa’s literary giants. Novelist Siddhartha Deb reviews Nadine Gordimer’s new book, Beethoven Was One Sixteenth Black and Other Stories. A taste, from Deb’s conclusion:

These stories aren’t mere exercises. Even as variations, with a fixed set of characters confronting similar situations, they create discrete, pulsating worlds. None of the characters are aware that their situations echo a common theme. Their lives are unique, and the endings they stumble toward are all-encompassing, complete, inevitable. It is Gordimer’s special skill that she can both make us feel the distinct yearnings of these characters, where nothing else matters, and allow us to stand back and perceive the parts they play in a larger collective pattern. As she always has, Gordimer offers her readers a rare combination of intimacy and transcendence.

In the same edition of the book review Rachel Donadio contributes an essay in which she speculates as to why JM Coetzee left South Africa for Australia:

Why would a novelist who has written so powerfully about the land of his birth pack up and leave? Were his 2002 move and his taking of Australian citizenship last year a betrayal of his homeland, or a rejoinder to a country whose new government had denounced one of his most important novels as racist? Was it just another example of the “white flight” that has sent hundreds of thousands of generally affluent South Africans to other Anglophone countries since the end of apartheid? Or was it a tacit acknowledgment that Coetzee had exhausted his South African material, that the next chapter in the country’s history was the rise of the black middle class, and what did an old resistance writer, with his aloof, middle-aged white narrators, know about that?

Many see in Coetzee’s departure the fissures in the new South Africa. Coetzee is renowned for his reticence, and thus has not provided an explanation for his departure.

Respected Africa expert Martin Meredith has been on quite a roll lately. His book The Fate of Africa: A History of 50 Years of Independence represents one of the most highly regarded and extensive treatments of the continent and its difficult recent past. He recently reissued his indictment of Robert Mugabe, Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe in revised form with the new title Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe. And now he has published Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers and the Making of South Africa, an exploration of South African history in the period from 1871 to 1910, and a book almost as ambitious as The Fate of Africa. Here is Janet Maslin’s review in The New York Times.  
 

A number of stories caught my attention this weekend. Here are a few of them, with brief commentary as appropriate:

The Makana Football Association, which operated surreptitiously on Robben Island among the political prisoners has achieved recognition from FIFA, the sport’s governing body. A feature film, More Than Just a Game, starring Tsotsi’s Presley Chweneyagae, is to be released in South Africa in the next few weeks.

Thabo Mbeki recently has been stepping up his advocacy of a trilateral free trade area between South Africa, India, and Brazil. Mbeki believes that this trade bloc will give these leading nations in the developing world a stronger hand in trades with the World Trade Organization and will focus on addressing poverty and underdevelopment in the three countries and within the regional spheres that they dominate.

The Mail & Guardian’s “ZA @ Play” has an interview with Mark Gevisser, the respected observer of South African politics whose forthcoming book Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred is highly anticipated. The interview is fairly anodyne, truth be told, but the book should stand as a definitive early treatment of Thabo Mbeki’s life if it can avoid the pitfalls of polemicism and advocacy to which virtually all of the books on Mbeki up to now have succumbed. 

Finally, a bit of a controversy has enveloped one of my old stomping grounds, Rhodes University. Last year Anne Warmenhoven submitted a doctoral thesis to Rhodes’ psychology department, which approved the dissertation and granted Warmenhoven the PhD. Her topic is the late disgraced former Proteas captain Hansie Cronje. But the dissertation apparently is nowhere to be found, apparently because members of Cronje’s family only agreed to speak with Warmwnhoven under conditions of secrecy. Obviously this goes against every principle of academic freedom and openness, not to mention ideals of transparency that are supposed to be a hallmark of the New South Africa.

The coming weekend’s New York Times Book Review includes Walter Kirn’s positive assessment of South Africa Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s new collection of literary criticism, Inner Workings: Literary Criticism, 2000-2005. The concluding paragraph asserts: “Inner Workings is Coetzee’s master class, and he honors us, too, by letting us sit in on it, despite our spotty preparation and the hasty ways we may use it.”