Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

Memmi was wrong, in that there was a minority of colonisers mainly of the Left spectrum, who identified themselves with the position that colonialism was unjust, racist and anti-human, and were prepared, first to act against it along with the great mass force of the colonised, and then to live under that force’s majority government. That is the logic of freedom; these colonisers saw that colonialism had misshapen them, too, its privileges were distortions, and the loss of these in post-colonial society would be and is normality they had never had a chance to experience. This logic reinforces, does not attempt to deny or diminish in any way, with white hubris, the fact that the colonised have freed themselves — no other could have done that in their name, out of the principles of any ideology. Theirs was ‘a kind of historical necessity by which colonial pressure created anti-colonial resistance’. 121

In examining the anachronism ‘The Coloniser Who Accepts’, Memmi makes en passant an extraordinary statement. ‘Compared to colonial racism, that of European doctrinaires seems transparent, barren of ideas and, at first sight, almost without passion.’ This written by a Jew in the 1950s, after the Nazi doctrine had sent millions of Jews, Gypsies and others to their death on its fanatically pursued racist theory. The colonial racist doctrine, extremely interestingly examined by Memmi, is summed up by him: the coloniser and the colonised, a definitive category formed by the colonial mind to justify that doctrine, ‘is what it is because they are what they are, and neither one nor the other will ever change’. How was this racial stasis to be maintained?

Memmi refutes religious conversion as one of the means to keep the colonised subservient, the coloniser’s authority standing in for the Divine Will on earth. ‘Contrary to general belief, the colonialist [coloniser] never seriously promoted the religious conversion of the colonised.’ He certainly did. Indeed, missionaries preceded colonisers in most territories, conquest advanced, gun in one hand and Bible in the other. ‘When colonialism proved to be a deadly, damaging scheme, the church washed its hands of it.’ The ‘deadliness’ was that ‘conversion of the colonized to the colonizer’s religion would have been a step towards assimilation’. The facts disprove this. While the church resigned many to freedom available to them only in heaven, reinforcing the colonialist creed of no such availability on earth, it produced others inspired by the rebel Jesus’s example, rebels themselves against the colonial system, unreconciled to it. The church establishment itself was highly ambiguous in its functions of representing Divine Justice, blessing slaves to save their souls before they were shipped.

If any such was needed, Memmi does establish eloquently that racism was not ‘an accidental detail, but … a consubstantial part of colonialism … the highest expression of that colonial system’. He takes leave of ‘The Colonizer Who Accepts’ with a sardonic salute: ‘Custodian of the values of civilization and history, he accomplishes a mission; he has the immense merit of bringing light to the colonized’s ignominious darkness. The fact that this role brings him privileges and respect is only justice; colonization is legitimate … with all its consequences … Colonization is eternal and he can look to his future without worries of any kind.’

If this coloniser who accepts to stay on in the country after liberation, living as he always did, tolerated by the independent government of the former colonised and privately retaining his old privileges — greasing a palm or two so that he may carry on farming the vast lands that were taken from the colonised — he may find he does have worry of a final kind. The land is seized back from him by those whose it was before colonisation stole it.

‘Colonisation is eternal.’

Perhaps in his devastating appraisal of colonialist arrogance Memmi spoke more prophetically than he knew.

Could one expect him in the 1950s to have looked all the way ahead to neocolonialism? Maybe it is unfair; one should be satisfied to have his deep and dread probing into the condition of people living under a unique combination of racism and greed: the colonial will to claim right to take as booty other people’s lives, other people’s lands, that was fundamental colonialism. But he might have foreseen that if colonies freed themselves of colonial governance, colonialism would not give up so easily. Mannoni did in 1947: ‘We must not, of course, underestimate the importance of economic relations, which is paramount; indeed it is very likely that economic conditions will determine the whole future of colonial peoples.’ In his 1965 preface Memmi affirms that for him ‘the economic aspect of colonization is fundamental’ but in his book he does not deal with those aspects of the economics of colonialism that were prescient when he wrote it. He remarks only that the self-appointed colonial mother complained that the colony was costing more to maintain than it was worth. What the original liens of colonialism established in trade mean in worth in post-colonial times, is plenty. There are former colonies whose natural resources, from cocoa to gold, are still bought low and sold high. One of globalisation’s immense tasks is to serve as the means of tackling this final form of colonialism. And it cannot be done for the developing countries that once were colonies (supposing there would be the will to do so …) but with them, in full recognition of their essential place in policy decisions.

The sickness of the world, technologically boastful, humanly inadequate, cannot be healed by traditional masters of the world alone. Events are proving that they themselves are not immune to anything, from terrorist attacks to HIV/Aids. Fanon saw this from the past, went further: ‘The Third World … faces Europe like a colossal mass whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers.’ 122The only update necessary is the amendment: to which Europe, the USA and other rich countries have not been able to find the answers.

2003

‘I think Turbott Wolfe may have been a man of genius.’

The first sentence boldly stakes out William Plomer’s power as a writer. He has taken you, the reader, by the scruff of the neck, for your attention. And it is up to him never to let it flag. For this is an extraordinary claim for a novelist to follow in the creation of his central character: produce the goods. How a genius? An artist? A writer? A thinker? There’s the caveat ‘may have been’, with the canny calculation that the verdict is going to be for the reader to find out, decide for him/herself. Plomer’s great gift in involving the reader controversially in his story is there, right away.

Plomer chose for his first novel the Conradian device of having the writer be narrator at second hand. Turbott Wolfe is introduced as a kind of Marlow, telling his tale not as an old salt — Marlow in Heart of Darkness — but a sick man with little time ahead of him and much to tell.

It turns out that Turbott Wolfe is only a leisure-time writer, an amateur artist; if he may be a genius, it is not as that sort of visionary. His vision is that which dares to venture through the blinding density of moral, political and social acceptances of the colonial era to a reality that could be obscured but not banished.

He is telling his story late, in a reverse exile, back in the banal, rose-patterned chintz comforts of England, from where he left as a young man ‘sent out to Africa’ in the 1920s for his health and to make his colonial fortune. He was set to run a trading store in Lembuland, ‘a region neither too civilized nor too remote’, and in preparation spent his parental annuity on stocking up with books, paint, pens, ink, paper, and — unlikely provision but significant of his idea of the life he expected to lead — a piano. The baggage of a genteel ‘civilized’ European life transported to Ovuzane, in remote South Africa. He began there organising his time between ‘trade and folk-lore [research on the spot] and painting and writing and music’. What an anachronism this was is soon evident as three realities invade its superficiality: the vast, undomesticated splendour of the landscape, the pettiness, crudity, sanctimoniousness of the local white population of colonial officials, farmers and missionaries, and the unselfconscious dignity and physical beauty of the blacks whom he served in his store.