Margaret Lenta   

This issue of Current Writing commemorates the centenary of Herman Charles Bosman’s birth in 1905. Bosman is generally recognised as the most accomplished South African practitioner of a particular kind of short story, the campfire tale, or the “oral-style” short story, as Craig MacKenzie (1999) has called it, and the fact that such stories are rarely or never written nowadays should remind us of a truth concerning South Africa and its stories.

Bosman’s dates – he died in 1951 – place him at the end of the possibilities of the oral-style story as a contemporary, living form, though his posthumous reputation and continuing popularity demonstrate the strength of nostalgia for the pioneering period when the norm of life was rural. The Anglo-Boer War was still in living memory in his youth, and some of his greatest stories are set in the period of this war and its aftermath. Violent conflict between the indigenous people of Africa and the white settlers moving northwards is the theme of “Makapan’s Caves”, another of his famous pieces. Though we are still moved by such stories, and by his comic tales which portray a past social order, it is unlikely that more of this ‘kind’ will be written. Bosman’s writings will survive and serve as mnemonic distillations of a part of the South African past – and the Anniversary Edition (1998 – 2005) of his work, in which his stories and novels are restored to their original texts and contextualised in excellent introductions, will help them to do so.

One of the truths revealed by the history of ‘kinds’ of stories is that though it is likely that stories will be told, written and read forever, themes and forms may have their day and afterwards cease to be used. The editor of New Contrast 33(1), Tom Eaton, has recently identified an “apparent decline of short fiction”, not only in South Africa but in England and America. He describes what is being published there in the form as “anaemic reinventions of the wheel”, which I assume means that he believes that themes which seem to be exhausted continue to be recycled. It is likely that Eaton is being provocative, but South African readers notice that some themes and some of the writers who used them have disappeared from our literary scene – the campfire tale is not the only dinosaur: the ‘struggle’ story has also faded as a living form. And long before this occurred, the white liberal narrative which assumed that what mattered were white attitudes and modes of behaviour had ceased to be written.

This is not to say that the early work of Dan Jacobson and Nadine Gordimer, for example, is no longer interesting, or that Mtutuzeli Matshoba should now remain unread. As in the case of Bosman, we continue to have an historical interest in the subject matter and a literary interest in masterly execution. But what is happening in the reconstruction period since 1994 is that South Africa is discovering new and urgent problems, some of them inherited from the recent past, and all of them relating in some way to the country’s history of racial conflict and economic competitiveness between groups. People who in the past meditated on current events, and wrote and published their work are now able – indeed, are under pressure – to move into active politics or direct involvement in industry and commerce. Few, if any black men have published collections of stories in the last decade, though Njabulo S Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003) contains short narratives which relate it to the genre. Sindiwe Magona’s collection, Push-Push! (1996), demonstrates what continues in rural black life and how much is changing, both in the country and in the city – but then, Magona is a woman, and has moreover lived in the United States for a long period, though she has returned to engage energetically with the new South Africa.

A review article by Michiel Heyns in this issue analyses The New Century of South African Short Stories (Chapman (ed) 2004) which offers stories from four periods, the remote past, the “colonial to modern” period, 1970 – 1990, and the post-1990 period. All of these, the editor, Chapman, implies, are still of interest, though different kinds of interest are present. He admits, however, that there is a kind of story which he would not include, in which the voice of a colonizer patronises or parodies indigenous peoples. The collection nevertheless includes San/Bushman legends, as well as myths and fables from other areas of the remote past. This is surely a way of saying that in particular periods, particular voices and narratives, even when they come from a lost past, are of interest, though we register that they are remote from us. And conversely, other kinds of story become uninteresting – or embarrassing.

This issue of Current Writing has been compiled in recognition of the claims of the present and what seems to me as editor (and to some South African critics) the still-interesting past, though it is by no means a comprehensive survey or analysis. It begins, fittingly, with Craig MacKenzie’s account of the compilation of the Anniversary Edition of Bosman’s works. In the second essay, Sue Marais reflects on the history of the South African short story in English and its connections to literature elsewhere over more than a century. In the third, Abraham H de Vries (himself a distinguished practitioner of the short story in Afrikaans) relates a part of the history of the form in this country which may be less well known to non-South Africans: the Afrikaans writers of the sixties, he claims, can now be seen as turning to formal innovation before they, and other Afrikaans writers, felt able, and compelled, to embark on political protest. Rob Gaylard’s essay goes back almost to the beginning of black writing in English to consider the work of RRR Dhlomo, whose stories of the mine compounds are an important though neglected area of South African writing. His “don’t teach your wife how to dance” advice to the early twentieth-century black husband now seems less appealing. Andrew Foley’s essay on Alan Paton’s Diepkloof stories goes back to the 1950s to reveal how the unhappiness of one of South Africa’s most famous writers, when apartheid was closing in and it seemed that what he had worked for would be swept away, permeated his fiction.

One of the tendencies of apartheid was to try, often successfully, to convince particular groups and communities that they were not ‘storyable’

– that their experience had neither ‘truth’ nor value and could not be the material of literature. One community which was affected by this belief was the Indian community of Natal – and it must be admitted that it was to a great degree the English-speaking community of Natal that originated the sense that Indian-descended people should be neither seen nor heard. Agnes Sam (1989) and the late Jayapraga Reddy (1987) are two writers who successfully asserted the literary importance of Indian experience. In this issue Duncan Brown’s article analyses Ronnie Govender’s stories (1996), which tell of the tropical lushness of Durban, its fruit trees and its gardens, which the Indian community did so much to enrich.

The short stories of Nadine Gordimer and Ivan Vladislavi‰, as well as a single story by Marlene van Niekerk, are discussed in essays written by Ileana Dimitriu, Gerald Gaylard and Mary West, respectively. The first two authors (and especially Gordimer, who has been publishing novels and stories continuously since 1949) were already respected writers during the apartheid era. Dimitriu is able to discuss the way in which Gordimer’s concerns have changed and widened, geographically, in the reconstruction period; Gaylard points to the way in which Vladislavi‰’s magic realism links his writing to that of authors in the rest of Africa. West’s article reveals the paradoxical plight of the white (female) liberal, who wishes not to be the stereotypical employer, and who nevertheless finds an alteration in her attitudes is not sufficient to change for the better her relationship with those whom she employs.

A much-less-than-comprehensive survey of so major a South African form is all that the limited scope of a single issue of this journal can supply, and I therefore make no apology for omissions (much as I may regret the absence of any article on Sindiwe Magona, for example). What is more important is that the reader in 2005 and after should be able to arrive at some sense, however limited and partial, of where the South African short story has been, and therefore where it might in future go.