Debate on the quality of books which had flooded local bookshop is yet to be
tickled with Nairobi International book fair with as.
According to
critics majority of younger writer don’t read other writers work with the major
objective of improving and ends up producing books which cannot make it to both
local and international scene because they luck both creativity and
originality.
Nigerians and
South Africa writers had been able to make impact on both local and
international scene because of there originality of reflect African way of
traditions and story telling.
One of the
great classic of our time is CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY which may be longer remembered than any other
novel of 1948, but not because it fits into any pattern of the modern novel. It
stands by itself; it creates rather than follows a tradition. It is at once
unashamedly innocent and subtly sophisticated. It is a story; is a prophecy; it
is a psalm. It is passionately African, as no book before it had been; it is
universal. It has in it elements of autobiography; yet it is selfless.
Let the reader discover the story for himself. Alan
Paton tells something of its pre-publication history in his own author’s
introduction. The rest is still living history. In the United States, where it
first saw print, the book had a small advance sale—33oo copies. It had no
book-club fanfare in advance of publication; it never reached the top of the
bestseller lists. But it made its way. People discovered it for themselves.
They are still discovering it.
The book which traces South Africa history is
example of the role played by writers in
recording both myth and history of a
given society and that is what my dear Kenyans younger writers should be doing
instead of producing touristic kinds of work
Even after being set book in our Schools upcoming
writers seems not to be changing there artistic approach.
In South Africa it had a fantastic success. In that
country of barely two million whites and nearly ten million mostly illiterate
blacks, its present sale of thirty-odd thousand copies is the equivalent of a
sale of more than two million copies in the United States. No other book in
South African history ever stirred such an overwhelming response—and the
aftermath of this response in the South African conscience is still to be
written.
Alan Paton himself is a native son of South Africa, born
in Pietermaritzburg in the east coast province of Natal in 1903. His father, a
Scots Presbyterian and something of a poet, went out to South Africa as a civil
servant just before the Boer War; his mother, though of English stock, was a third-generation
South African. Alan Paton’s entire schooling was South African. At college in
Pietermaritzburg, he specialized in science and in off hours he wrote poetry.
Until the European-American trip on which Cry, the Beloved Country came
spilling out of his sub consciousness, he had been out of South Africa only
once—at twenty-one, when he attended an Empire Students Conference in London,
and followed that with a motorcycle trip through England and Scotland.
Just out of college, he wrote two novels—and almost
immediately destroyed the manuscripts. He wrote some poetry. In his middle
years he wrote serious essays—much such essays as Arthur Jarvis writes in the
novel—for liberal South African magazines. It was life, rather than literature,
which prepared Paton to write Cry, the Beloved Country.
After college Alan Paton taught in good
schools—schools established for the sons of the rich, white minority in South
Africa. One of them was in Ixopo (in Natal), in those grass- covered hills
lovely beyond any singing of it, where the titihoya, the bird of the veld,
sings in his book. It was there that he met Dorrie Francis, the girl he
married, the mother of his two South-African schooled sons. She is also a born
South African. Then he went to teach in Pietermaritzburg, and there, when he
was about thirty, he suffered a severe attack of enteric fever. His illness
gave him time to think. He did not, he decided, want to make a life career of
teaching the sons of the rich.
South Africa was in one of its periods of fermenting
change in 1934. One of the new reforms transferred all correctional
institutions for young people under twenty-one from the Ministry of Justice to
the Ministry of Education, and the Minister of Education at that time was one
of South Africa’s great men, Jan Hofmeyr. Had he lived, Hofmeyr might have
succeeded to General Smuts’ mantle (he became Deputy Prime Minister in z 939)
and perhaps have changed the recent course of South African history. A Boer who
dared to tell his fellow Afrikaners that they must give up “thinking with the
blood,” must “maintain the essential value of human personality as something
independent of race or color,” must supplant fear with faith, Hofmeyr was one
of Alan Paton’s heroes; as a boy Paton had gone camping with him. Later, the
South African edition of Cry, the Beloved
Country, was dedicated to Jan Hofmeyr; it appeared three months before
Hofmeyr’s death. And the only poem which Alan Paton has published since his
college days was a poem on the death of Hofmeyr.
So, recovering from his fever, Alan Paton wrote to
Hofmeyr asking for a job. Somewhat to his horror, he got it—. as principal of
Diepkloof Reformatory, a huge prison school for delinquent black boys, set up
in a sort of barbed-wire stockade on the edge of South Africa’s greatest city,
Johannesburg. It was a penitentiary, a place of locked cells and of despair. In
ten years, under Hofmeyr’s inspiring leadership, Alan Paton transformed the
place. The barbed-wire vanished and gardens of geraniums took its place; the
bars were torn down; the whole atmosphere changed. Some of these boys made
good; and some, like Absalom in Cry, the Beloved Country, did not. You will
find suggestions of Diepkloof in Alan Paton’s novel, and there is a little of
Paton himself in the anonymous young white man at the school, as well as in the
character of Arthur Jarvis.
The “experiment” lasted more than ten years, a
fertile interval, though Paton himself calls it a “period of aridity” in his
literary life. He wrote serious articles but no poetry or fiction. Out of the experiment
grew Paton’s prison-study trip to Scandinavia, England and America which bore
such unexpected fruit in Cry, the Beloved Country. Paton felt so profoundly
that he needed a change that he sold his life insurance policies to finance the
trip away from Africa.
In Sweden Paton read and was moved by John
Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Possibly the reading of that novel turned his mind
back to his earlier interest in creative writing. He had at first no plan to
write a novel of his own. But, not speaking Swede passed many nights alone in
Ins hotel; and, as in his bout
with enteric fever, he had time to think and wonder. One dark afternoon a
friendly stranger took him to see the rose window in the cathedral of Trondheim
by torchlight. That somberly glowing experience set the mood. Pawn returned to
his hotel, sat down at a desk and between five and seven, the whole first
chapter of his novel poured out. He did not yet know what the rest of the story
was to be. The theme was clear—he had been living it. The story seemed to form
itself as he travelled. Parts were written in Stockholm, Trondheim, Oslo,
London, and all the way across the United States; it was finished in San
Francisco.
Then Paton went home to South Africa, and the book
followed him, and changed his life. The next chapter in his life, it is safe to
say, will involve more writing, and South Africa. It might involve him in an
effort to recall South Africa to the vision of Jan Hofmeyr.
When Alan Paton flew to New York, in October, 1949,
to see “Lost in the Stars,” the musical play Maxwell Anderson wrote upon themes
from Cry, the Beloved Country, lie spoke to a Book and Author luncheon upon the
South African background of his novel. It was an eloquent and revealing
profession of faith. To attempt to condense or paraphrase it would be foolish,
so, with a few modifications made with Mr. Paton’s consent, I quote it at
length.
“I was born,” he said, “in that country known as the
Union of South Africa. The heart of it is a great interior plateau that falls
on all sides to the sea. But when one thinks of it and remembers it, one is
aware not only of mountains and valleys, not only of the wide rolling stretches
of the veld, but of solemn and deep undertones that have nothing to do with any
mountain or any valley, but have to do with men. By some these are but vaguely
heard and dimly understood; but for others they are never silent, they become
ever more obtrusive and dominant, till the stretch of the sky and veld is
nothing more than the backdrop against which is being played a great human
drama in which I am deeply involved, my wife and my children, all men and their
wives and children, of all colors and tongues, in which all Africa is involved,
and all humanity and the world. For no country is an island, of itself entire.
“There are eleven to twelve million people in the
Union of South Africa. Of these only two and one-half million are white,
three-fifths of these being Afrikaans-speaking, two fifths English-speaking.
There are one million of what we call ‘colored’ people, the descendants of the
racial mixture which took place before white custom and law hardened against
it, and forbade it, under the influence of the white man’s intense
determination to survive on a black continent. There are about one-quarter
million Indians, whose forefathers were brought out by the English settlers to
work on the sugar farms of Natal. And there are eight million black people, the
people of the African tribes.
“The Afrikaans-speaking people are the descendants
of the Dutch who first came to the Cape of Good Hope, which Francis Drake, the
navigator, described as the fairest cape in all the circumference of the earth.
These people did not come to Africa to settle, but the fertile valleys and
great mountains of the Cape bound them with a spell.
“The primitive Bushmen and Hottentots could not
stand up against this new thing that came out of Europe, and they melted away.
But under the influence of the isolation of these vast spaces, and the
hardships and loneliness of this patriarchal life, the people from Europe and
the language from Holland changed. Something African entered into both people
and language, and changed them. This people themselves recognized and they
called themselves the Afrikaners. Their new and simple and flexible and
beautiful language they called Afrikaans; their love of this new country was
profound and passionate.
“But still another change awaited them. As the
Afrikaners moved yet further north they encountered the warlike tribes of the
black African people. A long and bloody warfare ensued between them. The black
men were numerous and savage and determined; the history of this encounter is one
of terror and violence. The black people became truly a part of the white man’s
mind.
“Under the influence of this danger, the Afrikaner
attitude toward black men hardened. The safety and survival of the small band
of white people were seen as dependent on the rigid separation of white and
black. It became the law that the relationship between white and black was to
be that between master and servant; and it became the iron law that between
white men and black women, between black men and white women, there was to be
no other relationship but this. Land was set aside for the conquered tribes,
but, as we see so clearly today, never enough.
“Yet another powerful influence entered into the
making of the Afrikaner soul. In 1 8oo the English came to the Cape, during the
Napoleonic Wars. They came initially, not as settlers, but as governors,
officials, missionaries, teachers, traders, and fortune-seekers. Their attitude
to the black man was different from that of the Afrikaner. The black man was
not their enemy; he was their business. This fundamental incompatibility
between two policies was to influence South African history for many years. It
reached a climactic point in 1836, when many of the Afrikaner trekkers,
abandoning all that they had so far gained, set out on the greatest trek of
all, into the heart of the sub-continent, in order to escape the new and alien
culture. There they set up the republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free
State. The position now was that the coastal regions of South Africa were Eng1i
h; the great interior plateau was Afrikaner; and on the fringes of both English
and Afrikaner worlds lived the black vim, doing the white man’s work for him,
steadily losing the dignity of their old ways of life.
In order for Kenyans writers to shine both locally
and internationally they must change there artistic approach of telling African
story with dignity it deserved from
grave digging, bull fighting, wedding among other in order to produces more Prof Ngugis,Francis Imbuga, Meja Mwangi to
name few.
This can only be achieved if story telling and
teaching of creative writing can be taken seriously in our School and Colleges,
while critics should sharpen there pens.
Ends
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