South African Literature: War, Violence and Conflict

This year is the centenary of what is popularly known as the Anglo-Boer War. Fighting began on 10 October 1899. It ended with the defeat of the Boer Republics when peace was signed in Pretoria on 31 May 1902. This conflict, fought out on South African soil, was a localised episode in the era of colonial and imperialist war that was later to assume global dimensions in World War I.

Its popular name served to perpetuate a pernicious misrepresentation particular to the colonial and racial discourses, which prevailed in South Africa until recently. Hyphenated, this name asserts that the conflict was not primarily but exclusively a British and Boer affair. Insofar as the declaration of war and the primary warring parties are concerned, this framing of the conflict as “a war between whites” has a certain restrictive validity. Historians and other commentators who have given currency to this exclusivity have used this fact as the main justification for this label.

Even those who gave the war a broader national designation by calling it the South African War still presented it as a white colonial affair only. In Eric Rosenthal’s archaic Encyclopaedia of South Africa, reissued in 1967, the entry on the war reveals just this. It chronicles, in the truncated form, the main outlines of the conflict by emphasising the roles of the colonial antagonists. This blinkered perspective is most clearly revealed in the casualties he lists towards the end of this entry.

“British casualties,” he writes, “totalled 97 477 of whom 5 774 were killed, 2 018 died of wounds, 198 died from accidents and 13,350 died from disease.” The 5 744 “killed”, we must infer, died in action. “The Boer losses,” he goes on, “were estimated about 6 000 men killed, apart from the deaths in the concentration camps.”

Important as every death in conflict is, my concern here is not with the accuracy of the figures. Meticulous researchers have produced other figures in any case. Even now, as I write, verification and reverifications are being made. What, in my view, is significant, however, is the word “apart”. Firstly, it sets aside the Boer casualties in the camps. Furthermore, the text is noticeably less detailed with regard to the different deaths the vanquished suffered. More importantly, what Rosenthal sets apart in order to conceal it, is the scandal of one of the methods of systematic genocide, namely the use of concentration camps. This method first reared its head in another part of the globe, in the same imperialist epoch, before being taken further in South Africa, and still later to reach its repulsive apotheosis in the Nazi death camps and Gulag of Communism. Spanish imperialism first utilised concentration camps in Cuba during what is known as the Second Insurrection of 1895-1896.

Besides playing down Boer losses, there is something else which the omission to provide even the most elementary statistical account of the deaths in the concentration camps, erases completely from history. These are the African or black casualties of the war.

In Rosenthal’s encyclopaedic account, which, if we accept the denotation of encyclopaedia as enkyklios meaning “circular” or “general” and paidea which means “discipline” or “instruction”, what we have here is not a rounded but a decidedly lopsided view. In the place of instruction we have brazen omission.

While Afrikaner historians emphasised the fate of white women and children in the camps they too effaced the black camps from their accounts of history to construct a myth of exclusive white martyrdom.

Stowell Kessler, associated with the War Museum of the Boer Republics in Bloemfontein, at a recent conference at the University of South Africa called “Rethinking the South African War”, in a paper not only inserted the black dimension of the war back into history but also verified 17 182 deaths in these camps. He points out that this figure is moderate since many of the Transvaal camps did not bother to record the deaths prior to the creation of the Department of Native Refugees in early 1901. He estimates, still conservatively, that a“t least 20 000 black women and children and elderly men died in the black camps. He considers the official record for deaths in the white camps, which stands at 27 927, a low estimate.”

What does all this dubious “history” mean? What does it have to do with literature? More pertinently: What does it have to do with contemporary South Africa? Three overwhelming questions.

Well, the violence and destruction of the war have produced another form of violence at the level of historiography. Now, a century later in the present post-apartheid context, this violence is being uncovered and brought into the open. Historians are now in the process not only of rethinking the war but also rewriting aspects of its history.

South African literature has been shaped not only by this war but also by the longer history of colonial conflict. This applies to all the languages and literatures. Its traces are in the works of writers as diverse as Thomas Mofolo, Sol Plaatjie, Peter Abrahams, Jan van Melle, Herman Charles Bosman, Alex la Guma, Andre Brink, JM Coetzee, Wally Serote, Bessie Head, MiriamTlali, Mike Nicol, John Miles, Dolf van Niekerk, Antjie Krog, Nadine Gordimer, Mark Behr and a whole generation of writers from the seventies who were conscripted to patrol the borders and fight in Angola or to quell the internal insurrection. The list goes on.

The extent to which this literature took on partisan perspectives, either to erase from its pages what official history omits, or to articulate what was silent in historical accounts, is an open question. Its disagreements or complicity with the then dominant historical discourses is not as self-evident as it might seem.

In Breytenbach’s evocatively written Dog Heart, the assertion that South Africa “has always been a violent country” runs like a litany through the account of his recent visit to the Boland. He dwells on post-apartheid brutality and crime, most of which are inflicted by black and, what he calls, brown people, on whites. He attributes this to “the pathological alienation of blacks” and the “arrogance and wealth of whites”.

This is a plausible but somewhat facile explanation. What he does not consider is the possibility that the violence inflicted on black South Africans for centuries has now come from the depths of repression to haunt those whose peace and safety were once premised on the violent oppression of others. Furthermore, the mechanisms of internalisation that further ensured that violence remained trapped within an enclosed black world are no longer functioning. If we add to this the fact that the official secrecy around state-sponsored violence ended with the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, then we sit with a situation charged with unresolved tensions.

The removal of the repressive blockages brought about by the end of what Amilcar Cabral, referring to apartheid, once called the largest concentration camp on earth, has produced new and truly terrifying convulsions. Foucault has traced this phenomenon in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the end to the oppressive feudal order in France. This, however, does not mean that the current orgy of crime and its violent manifestations in South Africa are in anyway acceptable. It threatens the very foundations of the new democracy since it strikes at the most basic rights of all South Africans.

The spectre of new forms of dehumanisation, produced under conditions of liberation, now haunts South Africa. The State is trying but is clearly unable to curtail or even contain the mayhem. What we see instead are new attempts to explain away the facts. In the process, South Africa is steadily descending into a mire of blood. It will take extraordinary social and cultural energies for the country to extricate itself from this.

A new literature which confronts this reality may provide a small but important perspective on this problem. To do this, it will have to avoid what Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror identified as the perverse attractiveness violence is sometimes invested with in literature. It will also have to steer clear of both the ideologically and racially inspired impulses to misrepresent and so conceal the causes, nature and extent of conflict and violence.

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