Nadine Gordimer - The Late Bourgeois World

But the others decided who should do what and they knew best who should approach whom. He would come home with the charge banked up glowing within him. The prescribed books on history, philosophy and literary criticism lay about (I read them while he was busy at meetings); what on earth would he have done with a Bachelor of Arts degree, anyway? It was a dead end that would have served a rich man’s son as a social token of attendance at a university. Perhaps he might have written something — he had passion and imagination; there were attempts, but he needed day-to-day involvement with others too much to be able to withhold himself in the inner concentration that I imagine a writer needs. He might have made a lawyer; but all the professions were part of the white club whose life membership ticket, his only birthright, he had torn up. He might have been a politician, even (it was in the family, after all), if political ambitions outside the maintenance of white power had been recognized. He might even have been a good revolutionary, if there had been a little more time, before all radical movements were banned, for him to acquire political discipline.

There are possibilities for me, but under what stone do they lie?

Max came home with a man called Spears Qwabe. He was a sodden, at-ease ex-schoolmaster who talked in a hoarse, soft voice. ‘The dangerous thing is we don’t look to see what comes after the struggle, we don’t think enough about what’s there on the other side. You must know where you’re going, man. You ask any of the chaps in town how he thinks we’re going to live when we’ve settled with the whites. He’s got a dreamy look in his eye thinking he’ll get a car and a job with a desk, that’s all. The same old set-up, only he’s not going to sit in the location or carry a pass. Even the political crowd don’t know where they going ideologically. ANC takes advice from the Commies, they willing to use their techniques of struggle, fine, okay, but apart from the few chaps who are Communists first and Africans second, who believes that ANC wants a society along orthodox Communist lines? They haven’t got a social doctrine — all right, you can wave the Freedom Charter, but how far does it go …? The same thing with PAC. Thinking just doesn’t go beyond the struggle. And if it does — without making a noise about it, what d’you think it is? What’s it amount to? Listen to them talk in their sleep and you’ll hear they just want to take over the works — the whole white social and economic set-up, man, the job lot. A black capitalist country with perhaps — I’ll say maybe — the nationalization of the mines as a gesture. “The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.” Nice poetry. But how they really going to work out an equitable distribution of what we’ve got? Does anybody talk sense about that? Does anybody bother to? And why should we have to take over any of the solutions of the East and West, cut-and-dried?’

‘You will, largely, whether you like it or not, because you’ll be taking over various institutions of the East and West, won’t you, you’re not going back to barter and cowrie currency —’ Max wanted to encourage him, show him off.

‘But wait — that’s nothing — human institutions are adaptable, isn’t it? What we need is to see ourselves as an industrialized people who can break out of the Capitalist — Communist pattern set by the nineteenth century for an industrialized society, and make a new pattern. Break right out.’ He talked a long time that first day he came, but maybe I remember as what he said then also what I heard him say later, at other times. ‘We want a modern democratic state, yes? Tribalism will make it bloody difficult, even here, where tribalism’s been just about finished off by the whites, anyway, although this government is playing it up again with Bantustans and so on. We must take the democratic elements of tribalism and incorporate them, use them, in a new doctrine of practical socialism. Socialism from Africa and for Africa. We don’t need to go to the West or the East to learn about the evils of monopoly, man — land always belonged to the tribe, grazing belonged to the tribe. You don’t have to teach us responsibility for the community welfare, we’ve always looked after each other and each other’s children. All this must be brought into a new ethos of the nation, eh? The spirit of our socialism will come from inside, from us, the technical realization will come from outside.’

Then Max began suddenly to rummage among our books and piles of newspapers, and he handed him Nyerere’s book.

‘Yes, yes — I know — but African socialism can’t be the work of one man. The doctrine of African socialism must be made by different thinkers, all adding to it. We must put it down, man. We’ve got political heroes, no thinkers. Mbeki, yes, all right, perhaps. We’ll have plenty political martyrs, plenty more; no thinkers! We must put it down, man!’

When Max was deeply interested, he had a way of standing before the person with whom he was in conversation, literally closing in for an exchange. I remember how he stood above the man in the dirty raincoat (even on the hottest day Spears held about him the late loneliness of a rainy three in the morning) saying, ‘Yes … but the two must run together, African socialism must be the philosophy of the struggle, it must be in at the struggle now — if it’s going to mean anything —’

I liked Spears. He drank but although he couldn’t always manage his legs he never lost the use of his tongue. He had a small coterie and they started calling themselves ‘Umanyano Ngamandla’, which meant something like ‘Let’s pull together’, as a colloquial name for an African socialist movement. Most of them were men who had broken away from the African National Congress or Pan African Congress. Max became their guru, or Spears became his; it doesn’t matter. COD ceased to exist in Max’s consciousness, he didn’t manage to return in decent order the papers that belonged to work he had been doing. I know that I went through our things to try and find them, but months dragged by, we moved house, and I grew more and more embarrassed at being asked for them. I had continued to work with COD because I thought Max was wrong — it frightened me to see him simply forget about the people we had worked with there. But I began to see in the work COD did, if not in my friends who did it, limitations that were in the nature of such an organization and that had always been there: I needed Max to be right.

Spears was with us most of the time. He and Max were formulating his methodology of African socialism. Max saw it as a series of pamphlets that would become the handbook, anyway, if not the bible, of the African revolution. We must put it down, man. The phrase was at once the purpose Spears lived by and the net of catchwords in which he tried to collect purpose when he was drinking; you could laugh at him when he repeated it drunk, go ahead and laugh at the infirmity of him: but it was like the name of a God, that does not alter in its omnipotence whether used as a curse or a blessing. We must put it down, man . I heard it all the time. It was the beat in his voice spacing the political clichés, grammatical constructions translated from Xhosa and literal translations from Afrikaans, of his strong-flavoured English.

And yet he did not see ‘getting it down’ in quite the literal terms that Max did, that Max could not escape from. Max planned point by point, chapter by chapter (at one time he thought of writing the whole thing in the form of Platonic dialogues); but Spears’ thinking erupted in a lava that, cooled to the process of note-taking, was difficult to break down into its component dissertation and analysis. Max and Spears talked late into the nights and every day Max wrote and recast from notes and memory. That was the time I came home from work and found Max yelling back at screaming Bobo. He had been trying to work all afternoon against the baby’s noisy games and interruptions. Max’s face was a child’s mask of hysterical frustration: I took Bobo and walked in the streets with him, but there was nothing I could do for the face of Max.