William Plomer – much ahead of his time!!

By Ishmael Mzwandile Soqaga

When one begins to reminisce about the past racial situation that inhumanely defined members of the human race as unequal, it becomes difficult for the victims of racial trauma to forget.  However, as usual the world can be fortunate enough to be blessed by some people who love peace and harmony.  The world has changed now because of such people.  Their profound efforts to speak about things that are daunting to the human existence are very sublime.  Imagine fascist Nazis leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini who threatened the world and caused such terrible atrocities against other racial groups (The Holocaust and Italy invasion of Ethiopia).  Furthermore, another disturbing thing that the world has witnessed wais the racial philosophy which white Americans used to believe in against black people in America.

Similarly, in South Africa acts of racial absurdity protracted for aeons – specifically some writers are mainly concerned about how blacks were racially treated by white authority in South Africa.   Unfortunately such written materials which they produce eschew the fact to evince a kosher and clear tangible history of South African past racial history.

Moreover, such writers will quickly select large part of history of racism in South Africa with a purpose to illustrate what actually transpired throughout the period of racism in South Africa.  It is a fact that majority of people who suffers lot of racial embarrassment and racial atrocity were black people.  Notwithstanding, it is necessary to know that not all white people believe in the unfounded racial philosophy of hoity-hoity of white race over other races (Blacks).  Essentially it is quite important for writers to think careful when they desire to write about anything that pertain racism in South Africa.  Writers should avoid behaving like certain pastors in the church who only quotes the Bible were it only apposite to their feelings.

The imperative issue here is that people like Mr William Plomer had played a very pivotal role in expressing discontent about racial situation in South Africa.  The stupendous and a well gifted literary figure, Plomer never hesitated to state his opinions unequivocal against racial injustice in South Africa.  Plomer in his poems engages the reader in intelligent thought about the potential of poetry to capture and explore a consciousness of social obligation.  

Among his earliest literary endeavours were co-operations with the editor of the Zulu-English newspaper Ilange Lase Natali (The Natal Sun), the writer, educationist and politician John L. Dube.  The issue involved the possibility of a national literature and, under the pseudonym P. Q. R., Plomer published among other pieces on the race theme ‘The Death of a Zulu’, an intimate, lyrical account of a Zulu women mourning the loss of her husband.  The point of the exercise was apparent to Es’skia Mphahlele when he remarked on Plomer’s depiction of the African person as a credible human being.  (Southern African Literatures, Michael Chapman page 182-183)

William Plomer was a South African poet and novelist, and he founded the magazine Voorslag (‘Whiplash’) with Roy Campbell in 1926.  He eventually settled in England and became the principal reader for the publishers Jonathan Cape in 1937.  Turbott Wolfe (1925) his first novel, was remarkable for its angry denunciations of racism.  The novel caused a scandal because it touched upon miscegenation and dared to criticize the supposed benevolence of whites toward blacks, even casting some white characters in the role of villains. I Speak of Africa (1927), a collection of short stories, exacerbated his reputation.

The life of William Plomer epitomized an elegant none myopic white writer who appreciates equality of all people before the law.  He remains one of the few extraordinary white writer who display awesome intelligent in the literary world.  In particular it is very healthy and interesting to know that Plomer lived in the time when apartheid was not official and he courageously wary about the unscrupulous racial demeanour of minority of white people.  Sensibly writers should invariably display a clear consciousness in providing a true history of racism in South Africa.  Inevitable the life and times of William Plomer reflects an authentic tale of South African none-racial society.  As issues of racism in South Africa may arise sporadically in post apartheid, is quite necessary for the people of South Africa and the world to draw a life lesson from the remarkable white writer like Plomer who valiantly dismissed the unfounded philosophy of racism in South Africa without fear or favour. 

Works

• 1925. Turbott Wolfe (novel)
• 1927. Notes for Poems. Hogarth Press, London (poetry)
• 1927. I Speak of Africa (short stories)
• 1929. The Family Tree. Hogarth, London (poetry)
• 1929. Paper Houses. Hogarth, London (short stories)
• 1931. Sado. Hogarth, London (novel)
• 1932. The Case is Altered (novel)
• 1932. The Fivefold Screen (poetry)
• 1933. The Child of Queen Victoria (short stories)
• 1933. Cecil Rhodes (biography)
• 1934. The Invaders (novel)
• 1936. Visiting the Caves. Cape, London (poetry)
• 1936. Ali the Lion (biography, reissued in 1970 as The Diamond of Janina)
• 1937. William Plomer (editor): Haruko Ichikawa: A Japanese Lady in Europe. Cape, London
• 1938. Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert (1870–1879)
• 1940. Selected Poems. Hogarth, London
• 1942. In a Bombed House, 1941: Elegy in Memory of Anthony Butts (poetry)
• 1943. Double Lives: An Autobiography. Cape, London.
• 1945. The Dorking Thigh and Other Satires (poetry)
• 1949. Four Countries. Cape, London (short stories)
• 1952. Museum Pieces (novel)
• 1955. A Shot in the Park (poetry, published in U.S. as Borderline Ballads)
• 1958. At Home: Memoirs. Cape, London.
• 1960. Collected Poems. Cape, London.
• 1960. A Choice of Ballads (poetry)
• 1966. Taste and Remember (poetry)
• 1975. The Autobiography of William Plomer. Cape, London (revision of Double Lives, he died before he could rework At Home)
• 1978. Electric Delights. Selected and introduced by Rupert Hart-Davis

YVONNE VERA: Butterfly Burning

     

  Set in the mid-1940s, in the black township of Makokoba in Bulawayo (Rhodesia), Butterfly Burning tells the story of the love between the 50-year old Fumbatha and the much younger Phephelaphi Dube. It is not a time or a place for happy love stories, and Fumbatha and Phephelaphi don't beat the odds.
   

    Vera fairly effectively captures the difficult life in the township, and the efforts of those that live there to maintain some sort of humanity, sometimes barely even realizing what they are up against:

The work is not their own: it is summoned. The time is not theirs: it is seized. The ordeal is their own. They work again and again, and in unguarded moments of hunger and surprise, they mistake their fate for fortune.

    

    Young Phephelaphi, in particular, has ambition and hopes -- but Vera warns early on: "Trust lovers to nurture hope till it festers." Around Phephelaphi are already a number of beaten and defeated souls, characters who make do as best they can.
    

   Fumbatha and Phephelaphi stumble across each other and fall in love. They are, briefly, happy. Fumbatha was "a man who made, and unmade, his own mind," while "Phephelaphi was a woman who chose her own destination and liked to watch the horizon change from pale morning to blue light."
    

   Among Phephelaphi's ambitions is to become a nurse. Problems arise, and she deals with them herself -- one in particularly gruesome fashion. It is too much for Fumbatha. Love falters, fails.
   

    It is a fairly simple story, but written with a grand, poetic sweep. "She is naked except for the weight of her own suffering, the weight of courage" and so on. The sentences are short. Each is pregnant with meaning and metaphor. Budding. Bursting. Overflowing.
    

   The novel's own gravity drags it down. Its portentousness prefigures its own doom. It is deadly serious. There is nothing wrong with being deadly serious, but it is not a justification in and of itself either: there has to be more.
      

 Yes, there is language. A fine use of language. Sort of. Poetic, one can call it. Lyrical. Undermining as much as supporting the tale being told. Certainly, it is a matter of taste, too.
    

   There's a rhythm to the language -- though Vera's is an odd staccato. It has the effect, here, of a pneumatic hammer. Relentless. Incessant. Wearying. But when it breaks the reader down it does not do so in support of the text, but against it.

       Vera writes: 

       Fumbatha sees the sky peel off the earth; that is the distance between the land and the sky. The hill is a surprise.
       A hand swings forward and throws a heavy load. Another picks the tune and adds a word. A pristine word to a song makes everything poignant. The birth of a word is more significant than the birth of a child.

  

     Vera's emphasis is on the birthing of words and expressions and turns of phrase. Despite her claim (her justification, in fact) such births are not more significant than the birth of a child. They can be, but only in exceptional circumstances, and Vera's circumstances here are not exceptional enough. Indeed, behind her thick veil of lyricism they are surprisingly plain. She does a disservice to reader and story alike by wrapping it all up in the obscuring and not quite poetic enough language.
    

   So, in more ways than one, Butterfly Burning is, ultimately, a novella of miscarriages, of clumsy, painful abortions.

       There is something to be said for Vera's approach and language (though we obviously don't know what that might be). She has some sense of language and expression, and the writing is not without talent. But the novel reads as though it were meticulously chiselled out of stone and then finely buffed -- leaving it still solid and completely lifeless. The novel appears to be art, but it is complete artifice. Some people clearly do enjoy "poetic" presentation of this sort -- many of the critics expressed admiration for it -- , but readers should be aware of what they are in for.

-        

* * Courtesy of COMPLETE REVIEW’s review

'Transferential displacement' in Bolaji's Far up! Far out! Far more!.

By Tiisetso M Thiba 

I have been reading Bolaji's new work, Far up! Far out! Far more (2014) and whilst wading through the over 25 short essays or stories in the book, I have been struck by the way the author seemingly comes across as somewhat displaced in some of the narratives.     

This is hardly surprising. After essentially living in South Africa for so many years where he published many books and remains a literary catalyst, the reader should expect jarring notes in many of the chapters; after the author returned to live in his native Nigeria for many months.

There are suggestions of some sort of displacement, or "Transferential displacement" as psychologists might dub it, in this new work. There are glimpses of this throughout, including the early passages of the Chapter, What is this?:       

…It did seem as if the Okada (Bike) personnel had taken over the town, considering their preponderance here. The way they flitted around hither and thither was mind-boggling.

“Oga, where you dey go?” they were asking with nigh-omniscient confidence. It was as if they were bullying people to board them as it were.

I smiled ruefully in front of the Medical Centre, or Clinic. I had escorted a friend here who needed a Medical Certificate; I sauntered around savouring the ambience outside; and ruminating to boot.

My mind had indeed wandered as two women came from the passage leading into the Clinic; they greeted me.

“Dumelang,” I said absent-mindedly, suddenly stiffening with embarrassment! I was thousands of kilometres away from South Africa now, and right here nobody knew what “dumela” – a common greeting in South Africa – meant! The two women stared at me as if I was crazy; quickly I re-adjusted and greeted them appropriately. “E pele Ma…e ku ise Ma.”…

But it is in the story or chapter titled The tantalising meal that the concept can be seen in full; in a sort of microcosm. The "story" warrants a rather extensive reproduction, as the tentative reader might even be a bit confused (though the narrative is simple enough):     

…The magnificent, long-familiar smell of the fried chicken wafted towards me. I was almost shaking with excitement.

Ah, pap and chicken again! The gentleman in charge of this eatery beamed at me. 

“Ntate!” he said. “I have not seen you for ages…”

His lady-helper, the one who usually served us smiled too. “It’s true Moholo,” she said. “Almost every day for years you always bought our food here: pap and the two fried chickens! You just disappeared!”

I smiled, but said nothing. I could only think of eating my plate. I watched impatiently as she expertly dished out the pap and chicken. “I will add another small one (making it 3 pieces of chicken!) as you have not been here for so long…” she said.

“Ke a leboha,” I said, really appreciating the gesture. She added: “Your favourite sitting place at the corner awaits you…enjoy the dijo (food)!”

I knew I would. I sat down trying my best not to jump onto the food like a caveman. The smell was already turning me rather crazy. I was gonna use my hands to eat the food!

But what was going on? Things were going hazy and crazy. Ki lode? I could not eat the food, despite my best efforts! Where was the food in front of me anyway? What was going on?

So near but yet so far. With a last desperate, hopeless lunge I tried to grab the food; but failed. And the disappearing food suddenly turned into a waiter beside me…

It was a waiter! Dressed to boot too. He said: “Sir, you have been sleeping and perhaps dreaming…while I went to get the food you ordered. I noticed when you got here you looked rather sick sir. But here is your food…”

He put a tray down on the table which had two plates on it. I felt betrayed. “I can’t smell the fried chicken” I said. “Where’s the pap…mealie meal?”

He stared at me as if I were crazy. “What are you talking about sir. What’s pap?…you ordered rice and ogunfe meat, which I have supplied now…”

I tried to snap fully back to reality. This was not South Africa, but west Africa, where few people knew about pap… Indeed I had been dreaming earlier. I smiled at the kindly waiter, but I could see he was still worried.

“You don’t look so good sir… I hope you’ll be able to eat the food a bit…”
I grinned at him and said: “Rest assured that no matter what, I always have a healthy appetite.”

“But what’s pap, mealie meal?” he queried again.

“Don’t you worry about that,” I said firmly. “As you saw I was dozing then and rambling. Now let me enjoy this fine food you have brought. Thanks…”…

Such vignettes reflect the author's pedigree, rooted in both South Africa and west Africa. These conflicting emotions and ideas even affect his own physical appearance, as we see from the early part of another chapter titled, On Mendicants:       

…I made my way stealthily across the muddied ante-road. Hours ago it had veritably rained cats and dogs! Now the deluge had abated and people were going about with elan.

Alas the poor, the beggars specifically are always with us. And I saw two of them now, horribly deformed, squatting begging for alms.

"Oga, rankadede. Take pity on us," one of them said; then he added: "Yellow man, please give us something."

The other one joined in: "Oga Yellow, give us somethin' to chop..."

I grunted. It can be strange how disparate things are construed in different climes. This reminded me of my days of youth when I was taunted at school for my alleged "yellow" (light) complexion. Yet when I stayed in South Africa most people regarded me as quite dark! …

African literary history has shown us that creative writers will always produce the goods, wherever they are - Es'kia Mphahlele is a good example, whose experiences around Africa produced works like Chirundu, and The Wanderers. With this new work, Mr Bolaji shows that wherever he is located, irrespective of suggestions of
"displacement", his creative juices remain fecund.

* Mr Tiisetso Thiba is a South African poet, literary commentator and activist

OLABISI AJALA: An African Abroad

I read this book twice when I was entering my teens; this was one of the prized books in my father's superb library long ago. Later on as a young adult I read this work again... 

It is a very impressive book, published some 50 years ago by an authentic African journalist who had travelled the world essentially on a motor cycle or scooter. The book is in no way fiction, as anybody who has actually read it will easily vouchsafe. 

What would strike the reader immediately is the sheer brilliance, professionalism and savvy of the author as an international journalist. Each chapter is prefaced by superb political backgrounds of pertinent countries - visited by the protagonist. 

The author got to meet several very important political leaders at the time in several countries. Yes, he was something of a rarity in these countries but arguably considering the era he was treated civilly and very well wherever he travelled to.

I still remember that at Immigration in Australia the author speculated aloud as to whether he was being "discriminated" against because of the colour of his skin; whereat he was told that there was nothing special about his colour and officials met his type regularly!

There are many photos reproduced in the book complementing the lurid accounts of the author in diverse countries. For those interested in world history, geography, politics etc, this is a magnificent work.

The publication of this book so many decades ago overseas is a triumph too! I will urge current Nigerian publishers to pluck this book from obscurity and re-publish it, so that the new generations(s) can appreciate the feats of an early eclectic Nigerian journalist and globe-trotter. It would also be a tribute to the now departed, illustrious Chief Ajala.

 - O Bolaji