David Attwell maintains that Coetzee's novels are ‘directed at understanding the conditions – linguistic, formal, historical and political – governing the writing of fiction in contemporary South Africa’. In turn, he offers the volume of interviews and essays he has edited as reflecting ‘on an encounter in which the legacies of European modernism and modern linguistics enter the turbulent waters of colonialism and apartheid’ (Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 3). This is an apt and elegant designation of the fictions' moment and space, and I use it as a starting point for considering the ways this fraught confluence is negotiated in self-reflexive novels which stage the impossibility of representation, estrange the norms of reality, and work, in Coetzee's words, to ‘demythologize history’.

Metropolitan reviewers, as well as those critics whose attention, when reading South African novels, was focused on detecting condemnations of an egregious political system, have been predisposed to proffer Coetzee's fictions as realist representations of, and humanist protests against, colonial rapacity at large, and in particular against the intricately institutionalized system of racial oppression that until recently prevailed in South Africa. Other critics whose concern is with the radicalism of Coetzee's textual practice, and who foreground parody and reflexivity as oppositional linguistic acts, argue that the authority of colonialism's narratives is undermined by subversive rewritings of the genres traditional to South African fiction–the heroic frontier myth, the farm romance, the liberal novel of stricken conscience – hence opening conventions to scrutiny and confronting the traditional and unquestioned notion of the canon (see Attridge, ‘Oppressive Silence’).

Conceding that J. M. Coetzee's fiction ‘remains unmatched’ in South African writing for its ‘multivalence, formal inventiveness, and virtuoso self-interrogation of narrative production and authority’, Benita Parry argues that Coetzee's writing ‘dissipates the engagement with political conditions it also inscribes’ (above, p. 164). In its general terms, a similar argument had a fair hearing as the most widely held view of Coetzee amongst the left in South Africa until about the mid-eighties, a view which was prominently endorsed by Nadine Gordimer in her review of Life & Times of Michael K in the New York Review of Books. There would be little point in turning over all this soil again; however, Parry's challenging critique raises certain issues that might profitably be taken up as a way of enabling us to understand more fully the dynamics of Coetzee's writing of the Emergency period. I refer here to the late eighties when the shreds of what passed for civil society under apartheid seemed finally to give way under the immense strains of the political struggle. The novel produced under–and in response to – these conditions was, of course, Age of Iron.

The two, I believe central, terms in Parry's argument that I shall take up are ‘dialogue’ and ‘fulfilment’. With respect to dialogue, the ‘principles around which novelistic meaning is organized in Coetzee's fictions owe nothing to knowledges which are not of European provenance’ – the West therefore remains ‘the culture of reference’ (pp. 150–1).

In an address made to the United States Congress in June of 1990, shortly after his release from prison, Nelson Mandela read into the Congressional record the names of those black American leaders whose struggle anticipated his own. ‘We could not’, Mandela stated, ‘have heard of and admired John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Jr and others – we could not have heard of these and not be moved to act as they were moved to act’ (Nixon, Homelands, 187). On 2 May 1994, after F. W. de Klerk's concession speech, Mandela spoke at an ANC victory celebration and again invoked the words of an American civil-rights leader; looking over at Coretta Scott King, who was with him on the podium, he repeated the words of her late husband, words with both personal and historical resonance: ‘Free at last! Free at last!’ (Mandela, Long Walk, 540).

In declining our invitation to contribute an article to this volume, Breyten Breytenbach wished us well but pointed out the impossibility of our task. How can we begin to assess the issues raised by literature written in South Africa from 1970 to 1995, considering our closeness to the event?

Produced during a period of intense political struggle, the literature of the period offers an opportunity to examine a set of complex questions whose importance goes well beyond the boundaries of a single country. Does literature have a distinctive role to play in political life? What is the writer's responsibility in a situation of political crisis? How does the writer's concern with form and language relate to the demands of ethics and politics? How are ethical priorities changing in relation to political developments, and how are these changes suggested or reflected in cultural practices? How do issues of class and gender interact with those of race in an environment that is marked by rapid political shifts?

Such issues inform a further set of questions about the specificity of South African literary traditions. How do these traditions draw on or set themselves against literary developments in the rest of Africa, and in Europe and the Americas? How useful are the terms ‘modernism’, ‘post modernism,’ ‘postcolonialism’, in the description of South African literatures?

In a letter written in 1920 Solomon Plaatje remarks that he had just completed ‘a novel – a love story after the manner of romances; but based on historical facts’. It would be: ‘Just like the style of Rider Haggard when he writes about the Zulus’ (Willan, Sol Plaatje, 254). A linguist, historian, nationalist, and founding member of the South African Native National Congress (later the ANC), Plaatje straddled cultural worlds. His novel Mhudi (1930), the first work of fiction by a black African to be published in English, itself represents a curious mix – more exploratory in form and as fantastical in conception as the tales of Haggard. Embracing Tswana oral tradition and Shakespearean vocabulary, epic battlefield scenes and romance, speeches of biblical gravity and slapstick tussles with lions, Mhudi also looks two ways in time: back to the nineteenth-century wars of the Mfecane, and – as Halley's comet blazes in the sky – to the future and its risks, the danger of deals made between Africans and Afrikaners.

At this time of massive shift and change in South Africa, for which Plaatje did his share of preparation, innovative early writing like Mhudi invites another look. In particular the multilayeredness created by Plaatje's variations of voice and register contrasts noticeably with the sense of hesitation, restraint, in some cases of delimitation, expressed both at stylistic and thematic levels in more recent late-apartheid South African fiction. in Mhudi a suggestive dissonance carries right through to the ending, which is double.

In 1988, a time of the most massive repression the country has ever known, the 500th anniversary of the ‘discovery’ of South Africa by the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias was commemorated in the small seaside resort of Mossel Bay. Three white actors in a rowing boat landed on a ‘whites-only’ beach, there to be welcomed by seven more whites wearing curly wigs and painted black. This simple ceremony was applauded by some 2,000 people, including the then President, P. W. Botha, in full regalia, with his cabinet. The spectacle would have been complete were it not for the absence of the local black population – an action precipitated by a ‘Coloured’ high-school teacher, who had warned the authorities that unless beach apartheid were ended, he and his pupils at least would not welcome Mr Dias back.

This event demonstrates a number of things. First of all, it suggests the complex absurdity of race politics in the country. Secondly, it registers the importance of theatrical representation or performance, broadly defined, in constructing a people's view of themselves – in this case, that of the white ruling class. And thirdly, it reveals the peculiar and persistent nature of the colonial imagination in a society which, although nominally independent, has long continued to exhibit the typical features of a colonial culture. Not only do the whites enact a version of the country's history which begins with the arrival of the Europeans; but the social, political, and legal superstructures they have set up exclude black people, so defined, even from this representation.

INTRODUCTION: PREMISE

It is globally known that the arts, especially theatre, have been one of the major features in the South African political struggle. From the 1970s, political theatre took a decidedly sharp critical view against apartheid. It was in the 1980s that the phenomenon of protest and resistance theatre performance was intensified within the country and exported to the international market.

This paper will focus on the way in which rhetoric in the arts was used to achieve power. I recognize that there have been some changes in other areas and that those changes are highly appreciated. Juxtaposed against the oppressed's expectation, those changes are too minuscule to warrant a celebration. I will show that while the liberation struggle recognized the role of the arts and culture, the developments since 1990 – especially since the 1994 elections – paint a different scenario in the politics of control. I will tease out questions in an attempt to elaborate on my convictions as one of the contributors to a theatre that has been and is always geared for change – a theatre that deals with consciousness – a theatre of resistance.

My concern in this essay is to offer an account of the unfolding post apartheid condition within which contemporary South African writing takes place; the working premise of my investigation is that that writing (at its best) relates to its environing condition as the latter's most fully reflexive self-knowledge. In thus reading the condition through the optic of the writing (and vice versa), I wish to position myself beyond the space opened up by Njabulo Ndebele when, in the dying apartheid years, he called so eloquently for a post-heroic culture of irony, the local, the ordinary: that is to say, a culture, or a literature, preoccupied not with the polar conflicts of ‘the people’ versus ‘the state’ but with textures of life which have eluded that epic battle and have grown insouciantly in the cracks of the structures that South Africa's fraught modernity has historically thrown up. As my guide to occupying this space I have enlisted the work of J. M. Coetzee, and in particular his novel The Master of Petersburg (1994). Seemingly poles apart from that of Ndebele, Coetzee's work will nonetheless be seen to stand to Ndebele's in a relation of illuminating complementarity. More to the point: in his most egregious digression thus far from the ‘South African’ theme, Coetzee licenses me to wander as extravagantly in the territory of history and theory and indeed into the same national culture: that of Russia. Coetzee's use of the late Dostoevsky is, in short, my precedent for drawing on the early Bakhtin.

We all know where South Africa is, but we do not yet know what it is. Ours is the privileged generation that will make that discovery, if the apertures in our eyes are wide enough. The problem is whether we have sufficient cultural imagination to grasp the rich texture of the free and united South Africa that we have done so much to bring about.

For decades now we have possessed a political programme for the future – the Freedom Charter. More recently the National Executive of the ANC has issued a set of Constitutional Guidelines which has laid down a basic constitutional approach to a united South Africa with a free and equal citizenry. What we have to ask ourselves now is whether we have an artistic and cultural vision that corresponds to this current phase in which a new South African nation is emerging. Can we say that we have begun to grasp the full dimensions of the new country and new people that is struggling to give birth to itself, or are we still trapped in the multiple ghettoes of the apartheid imagination?

For the sake of livening the debate on these questions, this paper will make a number of controversial observations.

The first proposition I make, and I do so fully aware of the fact that we are totally against censorship and for free speech, is that our members should be banned from saying that culture is a weapon of struggle.

A voice speaks or writes from the darkness of the slaughterhouse. A voice destined to die violently sets out to tell the story of its existence. Dying, the voice needs a story. Language and story give the functions of an individual meaning, but the individual meaning is always subsumed under the laws of language. Language reaches as far as the supra-individual reality of the subject, because the operations of language are the operations of history (Lacan, ‘The Function and Field of Language in Psychoanalysis’, 49). The necessity to create a coherent story of oneself, to justify oneself and one's actions by means of language, is the necessity to acquire the agreement, the desire of the other, although Estienne Barbier, the main character of André Brink's On the Contrary and its narrator, says: ‘I have given up trying to explain either others or myself. This is just a story’ (4). But the word ‘just’ underplays the importance and the necessity of telling the story in the face of imminent, if fictional, death. Stories are always ‘just’ that, stories, but they are always also more than ‘just’ stories. Both the story of Don Quixote and the legend of Jeanne d'Arc, integral parts of Brink's novel, demonstrate how ‘just stories’ determine the content and the style of human lives.

With the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement in the early 1970s, the politics inside South Africa changed from protest to challenge. Theatre not only reflected the change from protest to challenge, but in many respects was catalytic in it. In line with what was happening in the liberation struggle, Theatre for Resistance replaced Protest Theatre as the dominant mode of expression in the country. This happened when the political movement of the time decided to use culture and its products – including theatre – as weapons of the struggle. There was no longer any room, therefore, for Protest Theatre which by its very nature addressed itself to the oppressor with the view of appealing to his conscience. Cultural activists of the time felt that Protest Theatre, practised by both black and white intermediate classes, merely made a statement of disapproval or disagreement, but did not go beyond that. It was a theatre of complaint, of weeping, of self-pity, of moralizing, of mourning, and of hopelessness. It did not offer any solution beyond the depiction of the sad situation in which the oppressed found themselves. The best known practitioner of Protest Theatre was Athol Fugard. In the later phase of his career, Gibson Kente also turned to writing plays with overtly political content, creating Protest Theatre.

Césaire's actual return to his native island (as distinct from his fictional “return” enacted in the pages of Cahier) plunged him at once into a maelstrom of intense political and intellectual activity. The monsters of the Second World War had already been unleashed (hostilities broke out, in fact, as he was making the homeward journey by ship), and the Martinique to which he came home fell temporarily under the sway of the infamous Vichy regime, which was in open collaboration with the Nazi government. The society to which he now sought to commit his passion and energy was thus subject to the double oppression of colonialism and fascism. Not content to be an inspired teacher at the Lycée Schoelcher, where he himself had previously been a prize pupil, he soon took his place at the fore-front of the local artistic and political scene. His emergent lyric voice, then, was forged in the heat of a traumatic global convulsion and its aftermath, when the educated elite of the colonies was both reacting to the apparent debacle of European culture and intent on supplanting, if not destroying once and for all, the colonial order. Before attempting to illustrate these developments, it may be useful to sketch very briefly the political and social circumstances in which Césaire invented his distinctive lyric voice.

Aimé Césaire is a major contemporary poet from the French Antilles who is renowned throughout the francophone world. Although he is perhaps best known to the English-speaking public for his early book-length poetic masterpiece Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (“Journal of a Homecoming”), he is the author of seven volumes of lyric verse and four works for the theater that have brought him international acclaim. Three of his plays, which he has himself described as forming a “triptych,” were composed in the 1960s and explore problems of political independence and cultural decolonization in major areas of the black world (Africa, the Caribbean and North America).

Céesaire has been an eloquent and robust critic of colonialism throughout his career, and some of his polemical prose essays on the subject, such as his Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism), are veritable classics of the genre. A vivid idea of his stature in the French literary world may be gleaned from a cursory glance at some of the formal and informal honors he has garnered over the decades. These include not only prestigious French literary prizes, such as the Grand Prix National for poetry, but also the rare distinction of having special editions of his poems illustrated by artists of the caliber of Pablo Picasso and Wifredo Lam. In 1962, when he had not yet attained the age of fifty, a volume in the series Poetes d'Aujourd'hui was devoted to him – a step tantamount to his canonization as a major modernist voice.