6 Lebo Mashile, personal communication, June 18, 2015.
7 Phamodi 2013.
8 Dlakavu 2015.
9 Ndlovu 2014.
10 ‘Students Face Action over Racism.’ News24. August 6, 2014. http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Students-face-action-after-blackface-20140806
11 Magona 1995: 86.
12 Swisa 2010.
13 Malan 1990: 44–45.
14 Andrew 2012.
15 Mangcu 2015.
16 Taken from the Willem Boshoff website. July 28, 2015. http://www.willemboshoff.com/documents/artworks/RACIST_IN_SOUTH_AFRICA.htm
17 Haffajee 2015.
18 Haffajee 2015.
19 Ndebele 2007. The essay was written in 2000 and can be found at http://www.njabulondebele.co.za/images/uploads/finding_a_way_through_confusion_green.pdf
20 Gordimer 1988. The essays published in The Essential Gesture emerged from Gordimer’s Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at the University of Michigan, October 12, 1984. http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/g/gordimer85.pdf
21 Gordimer, Topping Bazin and Dallman Seymour 1990: 308.
3: BOUND TO VIOLENCE: SCRATCHING BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS WITH LESEGO RAMPOLOKENG
STACY HARDY AND LESEGO RAMPOLOKENG
I first met Lesego Rampolokeng at the beginning of the millennium, a turning point in the history of our country, a time of rapid change and radical uncertainty, but also one of tremendous excitement and infinite possibility. Everything was being questioned: race as well as social, political, religious, and cultural life. To my generation, the dream of a free South Africa provided a space for new possibilities, new audacities, transgressions, and a new quest for collective identity.1
This was the South Africa that Rampolokeng and I, together with fellow South African authors Ivan Vladislavić, Phaswane Mpe, K. Sello Duiker, and Nadine Botha were invited to represent at the 2003 Crossing Border Festival in Den Haag, Netherlands. We traveled as a group and in a very short period of time spontaneous friendships were forged — especially among the young writers. Sello and I spent many afternoons walking Den Haag’s streets, discussing the themes that propelled our work — the volatile intersections between race, class, and gender that continued to fracture post-apartheid society, especially in Cape Town, whose cosmopolitan character was strangely echoed in our surrounds.
We also talked about our dreams for other forms of belonging, of new friends, queer utopias, and different communities. Sex and desire with their erotic drives had a great part in it. As did politics. As Sello (Duiker 2001: 381) wrote in The Quiet Violence of Dreams: ‘There comes a time when we must face who we are boldly, when we must listen to the music of our dreams and delight ourselves with courage as we grasp our destinies firmly in our hands.’
In our youth and bravado — our naivety — we were unwilling, and perhaps unable to listen to the words of caution coming from the older writers in the group — Vladislavić and Rampolokeng — whose complex reading of post-apartheid South Africa undercut our fervor. We should have paid attention. A year later, both Phaswane Mpe and K. Sello Duiker were dead — Sello tragically by his own hand. Their deaths had a stark impact on me. On one hand I felt betrayed: what of our shared dreams? Our shared futures? On the other hand, I experienced an excruciating sense of loneliness, of being alone, as a writer, but also as a person.
In the years that followed, the energy that characterized the period immediately after apartheid dissipated, along with much of its optimism. Faced with a growing sense of loss, at a loss as to how to address this loss, I lost myself in books. I soon discovered that I was not alone in my lostness or my aloneness. South African literature is full of loners, lost relations, and thwarted relationships. Friendship when it does figure is at best fleeting, tenuous. More often than not it fails us, or we fail it. Alienation and despair are at the heart of J. M. Coetzee’s novels — friendship here never seems to establish anything but false communications based on misunderstandings. Vladislavić takes a different route, using friendship as a catalyst to launch his hapless, often tragic-comic characters into spirals of confusion. A less pessimistic approach, certainly, but ultimately one that ends with them no less alone. Even Zakes Mda’s dreamers, and the disordered and disorderly loners in Joel Matlou’s short stories fail to sustain lasting human relations. Bessie Head, Njabulo Ndebele and Keorapetse Kgositsile might make friendship a central concern, as have many writers from the so-called new generation (K. Sello Duiker, Songeziwe Mahlangu, and Masande Ntshanga,2 for example), but in their books salvation seldom comes through communion with others. Rather, if it is to be found, it is in losing ourselves in the marginal spaces of our own individual dreams, our own fantasies, of ideas and languages that allow us to escape the violence and creative scarcity of capitalism, fascism, or any oppressive reality at all.
And this lostness is really what saved me, I think, from a deep despair, and not just about the suicides and the deaths, but from the idea of death, and the ongoing poverty, deprivation, and violence that dogged our society despite the emergence of democracy, and a fundamental feeling of differentness or aloneness or separation from other people. Both literature and friendship extend the possibility of immersion in another consciousness. They’re the forms in which we find the power, in language, to inhabit, perceive, and recreate a shared world. Aloneness that undermines aloneness; a portrait of loneliness leaves us less alone.
Nowhere is this more starkly depicted and enacted than in the writing of Lesego Rampolokeng. As commentaries on, emergencies from, the specific social roots and the creative starvations of our beautiful land after 1994, his poetry books, novels, and spoken word recordings stand by themselves. Humanity is anti-social, evidently. And yet against this, Rampolokeng’s work yearns for, calls out for friendship, not negating but demanding reading, provoking engagement with others through an open embrace of difference so that, — as in Blake’s (1793) ‘opposition is true friendship’, the contraries are not dissolved, but realised.
His early works, such as Horns for Hondo (Rampolokeng 1990), operate viscerally, presenting poetry as something the body understands, as it is seduced and ensnared by the sound, its unpredictable multiplicity and originality, the