Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

In South Africa, people often said to me, under their breath, as though the air were bugged, “It’s ridiculous, I know.” I heard this from rural people, black and white, in the Northern Transvaal; I heard it in the homes of the white bourgeoisie; I heard it from committed liberals; I heard it from township moderates, on great estates, on farms, in the township drinking houses called shebeens. No one in South Africa will publicly acknowledge the absurdity of anything but apartheid, because apartheid is so much worse than whatever is wrong with the country now. But everyone is aware of spending a great deal of time in an absurd theater of symbolic respect.

The gratuitous complexity of this bureaucracy was often matched by a surprisingly simplistic approach to complex issues. In South Africa, big questions are very much in vogue. What is art? What is democracy? What is freedom? More astonishingly, confident answers to these questions abound. At the NAI meeting, matters that should have taken five minutes to cover took two hours, but matters that have concerned philosophers across the millennia were settled in time for lunch. As the meeting grew longer and longer, because every speech was being repeated in several languages, the head of the Credentials Committee, Nise Malange, stood up and said that because of the added difficulties, “The Happy Hour will have to turn into something else.” I was sitting next to the white critic Ivor Powell, who said that the headline for his report on this meeting would be just that line: no context, no explanations.

Several white South African artists I met referred to the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) as “black racists”; the PAC motto has been “One Settler, One Bullet.” This political group is far to the left of the ANC. But when I met Fitzroy Ngcukana, the PAC’s secretary for sports and culture, at eleven o’clock at night in a downtown Johannesburg jazz bar, he was much more forthcoming than any of the ANC people with whom I’d met. He was moderate in his views and expansive in his manner. We talked through much of the night. “People in the arts are free spirits and have the right to every approach,” he said. “They should do what they want without political control. Black and white artists should be friends, should learn from each other, cross-pollinate. Sectarianism must stop with the arts.”

The Hinterlands

In some sense, the art of South Africa all feels sullied. The work of black artists has been polluted by their reliance on a white market; the work of white artists has been contaminated by their inevitable complicity in an exploitative system. Oppression poisons both the oppressors and the oppressed, who all long for an imagined, highly romanticized innocence, something untouched and genuine, a prelapsarian rightness. Nowhere has that fantasy seemed closer to the surface than in Venda, one of the quasi-autonomous Bantustans where black people lived in ostensible independence with limited rights of self-governance—albeit with no economic means to sustain themselves except handouts from the central South African government.

As you go north from Johannesburg, the landscape of South Africa grows in scale and grandeur, and you begin to feel that you are incontrovertibly in Africa: the vague Europeanizing influence that is so powerful in Cape Town and half-successful in Johannesburg seems to disappear. If this area is a hotbed of gross Afrikaans conservatism, that must be because it is so obvious here that you cannot shut out Africa with a high fence or a well-planted garden of foreign herbs and flowers. The closer you get to Zimbabwe, the uglier the white cities are, and the more gratuitous their ugliness seems. I have never been anywhere else so incongruously free of charm as Pietersburg or Louis Trichardt. The road from Louis Trichardt to Venda climbs slowly into the gentle, lumbering hills south of the Limpopo River. It is still the N1, the biggest highway in South Africa, but its many lanes have dwindled to a ribbon of tar with dirt paths forking from either side. There is not much traffic: a few trucks taking goods up to Zim, a few combies (minibuses), an occasional farm vehicle. When you arrive in Venda, you are made quiet by it; an air of mystery and joy and of a dialogue of spirits hovers over Venda the same way an atmosphere of excitement and bustle and urban decay hangs over New York.