Resisting Marginality

RESISTING MARGINALITY - OR LIVING WITH XENOPHOBIA?

'Marginality ' is often used as a term to describe the situation of black South Africans who, although ostensibly part of the majority group, found themselves systematically excluded from or denied full participation in South African society. The ways in which apartheid did this are so notorious that they hardly need to be recapitulated here. The term is, of course, metaphorical and relational - it contrasts the periphery with the centre, and the situation of those who are excluded or disempowered with the situation of those who have access to the rights and privileges which citizenship normally confers.1 Marginality, as the term is frequently used in South Africa, signifies a political, social, economic, psychological and material condition that has defined the lives of (in particular) black South Africans from the colonial era through to the post-apartheid present. Recent events in South Africa have dramatised or made visible the continued exclusion or marginalisation of both black South Africans and foreign migrants in the informal settlements on our urban peripheries.

Much fiction by black South African writers reflects with stark realism the conditions which governed the lives of the oppressed and disenfranchised during the apartheid era. Urban black writing in South Africa effectively begins with the Drum writers and the District Six writers of the 1950s - although there were important precursors (among them Sol Plaatjie, the Dhlomo brothers and Peter Abrahams). The central subject of most of these stories is life in the apartheid ghetto or black township. The short fiction of Es 'kia Mphahlele, Can Themba and Bloke Modisane, or of the District Six writers (Richard Rive, Alex la Guma and James Matthews2) is an obvious example. The opening pages of La Guma 's A Walk in the Night provide a vivid description of Hanover Street, the central artery which ran from the Castle though the centre of District Six. It closely resembles the description of the same street in 'The Dead-End Kids of Hanover Street, ' one of the pieces of journalism that La Guma wrote for New Age in the 1950s.3

From Castle Bridge to Sheppard Street, Hanover Street runs through the heart of District Six, and along it one can feel the pulse beats of society. It is the main artery of the local world of haves and have nots, the prosperous and the poor, the struggling and the idle, the weak and the strong. Its colour is in the bright enamel signs, the neon lights, the shop-fronts, the littered gutters and draped washing. Pepsi Cola, Commando cigarettes, Sale Now On. Its life blood is the hawkers bawling their wares above the blare of jazz from the music shops: "Aartappels, ja. Uiwe, ja"; ragged youngsters leaping on and off the speeding trackless trams with the agility of monkeys; harassed mothers getting in groceries; shop assistants; the Durango Kids of 1956; and the knots of loungers under the balconies and in the doorways leading up to dim and mysterious rooms above the rows of shops and cafes. ( 'Dead-End Kids ' 1993, p. 9)

The New Age article goes on to investigate the lot of these 'dead-end kids ' who hang around the sidewalks and who are likely (like Willieboy or Michael Adonis in the novella) to drift into a life of crime.

Hanging around and waiting. Slums, disease, unemployment, lack of education, the terrible weight of the colour bar which withholds the finer things of life - all help to grind them down until many of them become beasts of prey roaming an unfriendly jungle. (1993, p. 10)

What is unusual about the novella is its relentless focus on the grim realities of life in the ghetto. We find in passage after passage a mixture of fascination and revulsion at the minutiae of dirt, decay and putrefaction. The novella makes the condition of marginality palpable in the sensory detail of its description of the District. District Six is represented as kind of 'underworld ' whose inhabitants live in a kind of twilight zone: 'In some of the doorways people sat or stood, murmuring idly in the fast-fading light like wasted ghosts in a plague-ridden city ' (La Guma 1968, p.19). The link to the title, and to the epigraph from Hamlet, is obvious. The inhabitants of the district seem 'doomed for a certain term to walk the night. ' The 'plague ' that afflicts the city is, of course, political or socio-economic in origin, and the marginalised condition of the residents of the district is a product (in the first instance) of their classification as 'coloured '. An externally imposed condition is nevertheless internalized and experienced as though it were an ontological condition.4 To put it more simply, perhaps, the novel reveals the 'fundamental injustice of a life where to be coloured is to commit a crime against oneself ' (Wade 1978, p. 168).5 La Guma 's novella (like much of his early work) explores the marginalised condition of a whole community - in this case a community defined by class (working-class), locality (inner-city ghetto), history (dispossession , discrimination, exclusion), and colour (this is a predominantly 'mixed-race ' community). The ambivalence of coloured identity is a leitmotif in the work of writers like Rive, La Guma, Nortje and Wicomb, and helps to explain the continuing sense of exclusion or marginalisation experienced by many members of this group in the 'new ' South Africa.6

When one turns to the work of the Drum writers - responsible for what has been called the 'Sophiatown Renaissance ' - one finds a story of survival against the odds. In spite of every attempt by the apartheid state to control, exclude or retribalise the black South Africans who migrated in their thousands to the cities and mines in search of work, they succeeded in establishing an urban presence in the inner city 'slumyards ' of Johannesburg in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the black townships and shanty towns that developed in the 1940s and 1950s. These city dwellers retained cultural, familial, and economic links with the rural areas, and drew on their cultural traditions and their strong sense of community to sustain them amid the general deprivation and insecurity of life in the apartheid city.7 At the same time, many township residents embraced a new, cosmopolitan modernity - by adopting or appropriating the styles and fashions and forms of expression that came to them from across the Atlantic. It is hardly possible to underestimate the impact of American popular culture (and its African-American component in particular) on black urban life in South Africa. It is a pervasive presence in the pages of Drum, and is a frequent reference point in the autobiographies of Peter Abrahams 's (Tell Freedom (1954)), Es 'kia Mphahele (Down Second Avenue (1959)) and Bloke Modisane (Blame me on History (1963a)).8

When one examines the personal lives of many of the Drum writers, however, it becomes obvious that that their lifestyle exacted a severe psychic toll. Like their tsotsi counterparts, they practised a kind of ghetto brinkmanship - but always with an awareness of the abyss below. They were interpellated by the norms and values of 'white ' Western civilisation and by the ideology of liberalism, as mediated by the missionaries and the educational institutions which they founded.9 The promise held out - implicitly or explicitly - was that if you were sufficiently 'cultured ' and 'educated ', if you embraced the virtues of hard work and self-improvement, you would eventually find acceptance and 'respectability '. It was left to the writers Drum generation to expose the falsity of this promise: no matter how hard they tried, or how much they steeped themselves in the culture of Western Europe, they remained trapped in their black skins. They were referred to by their fellow Africans as 'situations ' - situated somewhere between the ordinary working class township dwellers and the white middle-class lifestyle to which they aspired.10 In his autobiography, Modisane describes his determination to use his writing as 'the weapon for gate-crashing into the worlds which rejected [him] ' (88). His short story 'The Situation ' (1963) provides a case-study of his own predicament. Its subject matter is the ritualised humiliation that any black man could expect at any time in the streets of Johannesburg. This was felt most acutely by the educated black person (like Modisane or his protagonist) who longed for acceptance on his own terms. The story 's central theme - the burden of blackness/the desire for whiteness - is explored in greater depth in Modisane 's autobiography, Blame me on History (1963a).

This predicament is explored with painful clarity by the writer most closely associated with Drum, Can Themba. Two short autobiographical pieces, 'Crepuscule ' and 'The Bottom of the Bottle ', date from the late 50s or early 60s - a period which coincides with the destruction of Sophiatown and Themba 's own decline into alcoholism. 'Crepuscule ' describes the invasion of the writer 's personal life by the prohibitions of the apartheid state, and points to the kind of pathologies that this induces in both black and white South Africans. The title suggests a liminal, in-between state; in the piece Themba explores the 'bitter sense of loss ' of those who find themselves between cultures, 'caught in the characterless world of belonging nowhere ' (1972a, p. 8). He speaks directly and personally, without irony or indirection, of 'the whiteman 's crime against [his] personality ' (1972a, p. 9). His estrangement from his own traditional culture leaves him exposed and vulnerable, striving in vain for acceptance in 'this whiteman 's world where everything significant is forbidden ' (1972a, p. 8). Like Modisane, he is 'the eternal alien between two worlds ' (Modisane 1963a, p. 218). 'I think the rest of African society looked upon us as an excrescence, ' he says (1972b, p. 110). This predicament is summed up memorably in 'The Bottom of the Bottle ': We were those sensitive might-have-beens who had knocked on the door of white civilisation (at the highest levels that South Africa could offer) and had heard a gruff 'No ' or a 'Yes ' so shaky and insincere that we withdrew our snail horns at once. (p. 110)

'How revealing is that parenthesis, ' writes Rabkin. 'When the white government stepped in to slam the door firmly in the face of the black man who claimed a part in 'white civilisation ', the black intelligentsia (certainly the part of it to which the Drum group belonged) collapsed ' (1975, p. 122).
It was this condition, or this pathology, that a new generation of black intellectuals and leaders set out to reverse or redress in the late 1960s. Serote reflects on the painful dilemma of the Drum generation of writers in a piece entitled 'The Nakasa World ', published in Contrast in 1973: 'For a very long time white South Africa regarded black people as a problem and for a very long time black South Africans reacted to this by trying to be duplicates of whites, thus accepting themselves as non-whites - an intricate and painful procedure indeed. . . . Poor Nat, he died still believing that he was a non-white ' (pp. 19, 21). Something had to fill the political and cultural void of the 1960s, and that something was Black Consciousness. In the space of a few years this movement succeeded in transforming the political and cultural landscape of the country. The slogan, 'Black man, you 're on your own ' summed up the need of the black man (it was, invariably, a man - this was an overtly gendered discourse) to rid himself of any sense of inferiority or dependence. 'Blackness ' came to signify pride and self-reliance - and a rejection of 'white ' values and norms.11 As Modisane 's title, Blame me on History, suggests, this was a step too far for his generation of black writers.12 Black Consciousness was the logical and perhaps inevitable response to their predicament. The black man, according to Biko, had become 'a shell, a shadow of a man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity ' (1978, p. 28). The seeds sown by Biko and his fellow activists finally exploded in the streets of Soweto on June 16, 1976, in an unprecedented expression of anger, outrage and defiance on the part of thousands of secondary school children. It was a defining moment, one which altered the political landscape of South Africa forever.

When one turns to the work of the post-1976 Staffrider generation of writers, one would expect to find an unambiguous assertion of the values and attitudes associated with black consciousness - and to some extent one does. The poetry of Mafika Gwala is an obvious example.13 In asserting the centrality and value of 'blackness ', in rejecting the appeal of the 'white ' world and of 'Western ' values, these writers invoke their own history and cultural traditions; 'blackness ' become a source of pride and identity. If, as Boehmer suggests, postcoloniality can be defined as 'that condition in which colonised peoples seek to take their place, forcibly or otherwise, as historical subjects ', then these writers mark the unequivocal assertion of a postcolonial identity on the part of black South Africans (1995, p.3). In terms of prose fiction, the obvious example is the work of Mtutuzeli Matshoba. Matshoba was born and bred in Soweto; his stories were published in Staffrider and in a collection entitled Call me not a Man (1979).14 For Matshoba, the impulse to write is inseparable from the political events which transformed his life and the lives of those around him. His writing amounts to a testimony to the times he has lived through: '"These were the events that shaped the Steve Bikos and the Solomon Mahlangus, and the many others who came before and after them" ' (1979, p. x). The contrast with the Drum writers could not be starker. The opening paragraph of the title story addresses the reader directly - and the reader, like the narrator, is a fellow black man. Both share an identity in oppression: 'To the same chain gang do we belong ' (1979, p. 18). The rhetoric focuses our attention on a collective plight - one that, by implication, must be addressed collectively.15 The tone is angry, bitter, self-recriminatory. As Vaughan points out, 'the whole liberal preoccupation with individual interiority, and hence with subtle and elaborate characterisation, is dispensed with. . . . Matshoba concentrates on situation. Each story has an exemplary quality ' (1981, p. 45).
On closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that the rhetorical appeals to black solidarity mask differences which (inevitably exist) within the black community. In 'Three Days in the Land of a Dying Illusion ', for example, the narrator reveals a preference for urban life: he finds the country 'too dull and mentally unhealthy ' (1979, p. 151). This contrasts with his professed interest in and identification with those of the 'third denomination '16 who share his railway carriage (1979, pp. 146, 152). At times he cannot help sounding superior or condescending: 'Poor brothers, fighting among themselves, little aware that the congestion had occurred because we of the third denomination were fenced into a quarter of the platform area . . . ' (1979, p. 152). Here he speaks from a position of superior knowledge or insight. Differences based on gender, class, locality, education and occupation cannot be entirely suppressed. There is in reality no such thing as a simple, uncomplicated 'black ' identity which is shared unproblematically by all black people.
Similar tensions are evident in the black poetry of the 1970s. While some of this work appeals to black solidarity and evokes a spirit of resistance,17 it also registers the realities of poverty, deprivation and despair. Serote 's 'City Johannesburg ' is an ironic praise poem to the city which draws in black workers every morning, and expels them again every evening. For all its vibrancy and power and allure, the city sucks them dry and discards them. The speaker finds himself torn between the city - where he seeks work - and the township - where he supposedly belongs:

And as I go back, to my love,
My dongas, my dust, my people, my death,
Where death lurks in the dark like a blade in the flesh,
I can feel your roots, anchoring your might, my feebleness
In my flesh, in my mind, in my blood,
And everything about you says it,
That, that is all you need of me.
Joburg City, Johannesburg. . . .
(1972, p. 4)

The poem (both an appeal and a lament) articulates the speaker 's agonised relation to Johannesburg, eGoli, the city of gold, which has acted as a magnet to so many migrants over so many years, both from within South Africa and from beyond its borders. Here marginality is a material, social, economic and psychological condition - and of course it was precisely this condition that Black Consciousness sought to reverse. Powerlessness, exclusion and violence were nevertheless part of the daily lived experience of many black South Africans.
As Trump and others have pointed out, for all the emphasis on community on the part of black writers, there is an almost equivalent emphasis on the destructive forces which threaten to tear the community apart.18 Another striking poem in Serote 's first collection, Yakhal 'Inkomo (1972) appeals to the black youths who prey on their fellow township residents:

Oh you black boys,
You horde-waters that sweep over black pastures,
You bloody bodies that dodge bullets,
My brothers in the streets,
Who booze and listen to records,
Who 've tasted rape of mothers and sisters,
Who take alms from white hands,
Who grab bread from black mouths,
Oh you black boys,
Who spill blood as easy as saying 'Voetsek '
Listen!
Come my black brothers in the streets,
Listen,
It 's black women who are crying.
(1972, p. 19)

This anguished appeal has a contemporary ring to it, given the recent wave of xenophobic and criminal violence in South Africa. The difference is that now the targets seem to be fellow Africans, migrants or refugees from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, Malawi, the DRC, and the horn of Africa. It is their humanity which is being denied, their right to seek refuge or find work in South Africa that is repudiated. The recent violence can be seen as an expression of frustration by (in particular) the residents of informal settlements at their own desperate living conditions, at the lack of service delivery, at the rising prices of food and fuel, at the lack of employment and the lack of proper housing. It can be seen, in short, as a protest at their continued marginality and exclusion. At the latest count there were about 400 000 applicants are on the housing list in Cape Town alone.19
Why attack other black Africans (who often live in similarly desperate and deprived conditions)? Clearly, if the blame lies anywhere it is with the failure of the post-apartheid state to address their most basic needs. The answer may be found (in part) in the psychology of scapegoating. This is, in fact, the subject of one of Mphahlele 's 'Lesane ' stories, in which a township mob turns on and attacks 'Chipile ', an Indian hawker who plies his trade in their streets.20 They are provoked by nothing more sinister than a worm-eaten apple sold (unwittingly) to one of his customers. Mphahlele provides a context for this apparently unprovoked attack: it 's a Saturday; the trains are packed with commuters returning from work; their pent-up frustration is waiting for some release: 'It was Saturday. The white man 's work was suspended. And then somebody beat his wife and children. A boy dug his knife into human flesh. A boy twisted the arm of a girl. The Zionists sang their half-pagan, half-Christian songs. All so brutally ' (1957b, p. 152).
The recent wave of violence seems to be prompted (in part) by similar impulses: migrants from elsewhere in Africa become convenient scapegoats for the accumulated frustration and resentment of those who are poor, black and unemployed. The consequences have been dramatic: within a few days in May 2008 we have seen the displacement of some 200 000 people nationwide; there have been at least 62 deaths - and the death toll continues. The perpetrators usually come from the most marginalised and at-risk communities on the urban periphery - communities where criminal and domestic violence is endemic, where there are high levels of unemployment, where whole families live off the social grants provided to single mothers or the elderly or the disabled, and where the gang offers some form of protection (as well of course, as a source of income). These disaffected young men (they are, invariably, men) are the latter-day counterparts of La Guma 's 'dead-end kids of Hanover Street '. They have yet to experience the 'miracle ' of the new South Africa, or see the benefits of democracy and transformation. And we all know what happens to 'a dream deferred ' . . . .21

Xenophobia is of course nothing new in South Africa. The intolerance directed at those who are regarded as 'other ' (on the grounds of nationality, or ethnicity, or locality, or sexual orientation, or HIV-AIDS, or whatever) is dissected in Phaswane Mpe 's 2001 post-apartheid novel, Welcome to our Hillbrow (2001). Mpe - while he was alive - spoke about the need to engage with the 'sensitive issues in South African literature and society ' - in particular, HIV-AIDS and xenophobia. We must address problems, he argues, if we are to combat complacency and to 'provide an antidote to those who think that South Africans have nothing to write about in the post-apartheid context ' (Undated interview, p. 2)22. In his novel the implicit (and sometimes explicit) plea for tolerance, rationality, understanding and forgiveness contrasts starkly with the views and prejudices attributed to members of the rural community of Tiragalong or to the residents of inner-city Hillbrow. Mpe 's novel deconstructs the differences that supposedly distinguish 'us ' from 'others '. His narrator comments:

There are very few Hillbrowans, if you think about it, who were not originally wanderers from Tiragalong and other rural villages, who have come here, as we have, in search of education and work. Many of the Makwerekwere you accuse of this and that are no different to us - sojourners, here in search of green pastures. . . . (2001, p. 18).

Similar perceptions or prejudices seem to underpin much of the recent Afriphobic violence: 'They take our jobs, they steal our women ' are recurring refrains. Recent comments by Thabo Mbeki seek to provide a normative ethical frame - he laments the absence of the attitudes and values traditionally associated with ubuntu: 'The shameful actions of a few have blemished the name of South Africa through criminal acts against our African brothers and sisters from other parts of the continent ' (2008, p. 11). If this response seems inadequate, it is because it attempts to minimize the extent and significance of the outbreaks of violence around the country - another, instance, perhaps, of the 'denialism ' often attributed to Mbeki or his administration. In particular his comments fail to acknowledge the extent to which socio-economic conditions are the breeding ground for xenophobia and intolerance. His address also ignores the government 's own culpability or complicity: its policy towards migrants emphasises control and exclusion (it refuses refugee status to most Zimbabweans, for example, and deports large numbers of would-be migrants kept in holding camps);23 it ignores the corruption and inefficiency of the Department of Home affairs - the most dysfunctional of all government departments; it also ignores the corrupt and xenophobic behaviour of many members of the South African police, particularly in Johannesburg. And of course it takes no account of the apparent failure of the government 's policy towards Zimbabwe - one of the consequences of which is the continuing exodus of refugees from Zimbabwe.24 The recent wave of violence has removed any remaining grounds for complacency about 'the new South Africa ' or 'the rainbow nation '. We have been forced recognise the extent to which prejudice, intolerance and violence continue to afflict our society. A survey by the Southern African Migration Project showed that 'South Africa exhibits levels of intolerance and hostility to outsiders unlike virtually anything seen in other parts of the world ' (2008, 16 July). (It found, for example, that the proportion of people wanting strict limits or a total prohibition on immigration rose from 65% in 1997 to 78% in 1999.) We have had to acknowledge that many of the urban poor on the margins of our cities have yet to experience the benefits promised by our new democracy, or to enjoy the rights proclaimed in our constitution. Ironically, they live in the same conditions of poverty and insecurity as many of the victims of the recent xenophobic and criminal violence. We are reminded, again, that South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world: extremes of poverty and affluence coexist almost side by side - and our society is becoming more unequal.25
What of the future? Unless there is a redirection of the state 's priorities, strategies and resources, one can predict a rising tide of discontent and disaffection - fuelled by inflation and rising prices - and directed at the government or at the new black elite or indeed at anyone who makes a convenient scapegoat.. For the time being some members of this urban underclass may pin their hopes on ANC President and heir apparent, Jacob Zuma - but when he fails to deliver, what then?

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Ashcroft, B et al., 1998. Key concepts in post-colonial studies. London: Routledge.

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Statement by the South African Institute of Race Relations on causal factors behind the violent unrest in an around Johannesburg - 20 May 2008.

The perfect storm: The realities of xenophobia in contemporary South Africa '.

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Cited: A Dictionary of South African English on historical principles. 1996. Silva P., et al., eds. Oxford University Press. Abrahams, P, 1942. Dark testament. London: Allen & Unwin. Ashcroft, B et al., 1998. Key concepts in post-colonial studies. London: Routledge. Biko, S., 1978. I write what I like. Ed. Aelred Stubbs. London: Heinemann. Boehmer, E., 1995 Chapman, M., ed., 1989. The Drum decade: stories from the 1950s. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Weekend Argus. 2008. Coloured movement to be launched in the Boland soon, Weekend Argus, 28 June. Dhlomo, R.R.R., 1975. Twenty stories. English in Africa 2 (1), 9-57. Dikobe, M., [Rammitloa M]. 1973. The Marabi dance. London: Heinemann. Gaylard, R., 1995. 'A Man is a man because of other men ': the 'Lesane ' stories of Es 'kia Mphahlele. English in Africa 22 (1), 72-90. Gwala, M.P., 1977 Hartley, A., 2007. Cape Town housing crisis reaches new heights, Cape Times, 14 March, p. 1. Hughes, L JanMohamed, A., 1983. Manichean aesthetics: the politics of literature in colonial Africa. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Karis, T La Guma, A., 1968. A walk in the night. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. La Guma, A., 1956 Matshoba, M., 1979. Call me not a man. Johannesburg: Ravan. Mbeki, T., 2008. Our heads are bowed in shame. [Edited version of a radio and television address on Africa Day, 25 May 2008.] Cape Times, 27 May, p. 11. Modisane, B., 1963a, 1986. Blame me on history. Johannesburg: Ad Donker. Modisane, B., 1963b. The Situation. Black Orpheus 16, pp. 10-16. Mpe, P., 2001. Welcome to our Hillbrow. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Mpe, P., No date. Interviews - Phaswane Mpe. Exclusive Books.Com. [Interview submitted by the author.] Accessed 12 June 2004. Mphahlele, Es 'kia., 1957 Mtshali, O., 1980. Fireflames. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter. Nixon, R., 1994. Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African culture and the world beyond. New York: Routledge. Pressly, D., 2008. Wealth gap grows every day - report. Cape Times 17 July, p. 3. Protecting refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in South Africa. 2008. CoRMSA. 18 June. < http://www.lhr.org.za/publications/2008-cormsa-report-protecting-refugees-asylum-seekers-and-immigrants-south-africa> Rabkin, D., 1975 Sampson, A., 1956. Drum: A venture into the new Africa. London: Collins. Serote, M.W., 1972. Yakhal ' inkomo. Johannesburg: Renoster Books. Serote, M.W., 1973. The Nakasa world. Contrast 8 (3), 16-21. Sole, K, 1993. Authority, authenticity and the black writer: depictions of politics and community in selected fictional black consciousness texts. ' Thesis (PdD). University of the Witwatersrand. Sole, K., 1983. Culture, politics and the black writer: A critical look at prevailing assumptions. English in Africa 10 (1), 37-84. The perfect storm: The realities of xenophobia in contemporary South Africa '. Themba, C., 1972a Themba, C., 1972b. The bottom of the bottle. ' The Will to Die, 108-115. Trump, M., 1988. Black Short Fiction since 1976. Research in African Literatures 19 (1), 34-64. Vaughan, M., 1981. The stories of Mtutuzeli Matshoba. Staffrider 4 (3), 45-47. Wade, M., 1978. Art and Morality in Alex la Guma 's A Walk in the Night. In: K. Parker, ed. The South African Novel in English. London: Macmillan, 165-191.