MOVIES, BOOKS OFFERED US RELIEF FROM APARTHEID HELL
EVERY now and then, I get asked by my children, nephews and nieces how life was really like at the height of apartheid? Is it true that a black person walking down the street would, at the approach of a white person, have to get off the pavement, stand in the street or the gutter until the great baas had passed?
Is it true that policemen could break into your house in the middle of the night and ask everyone in the house to produce their “papers” that authorised their presence in the township, failing which they’d be sent to jail, and later banished to the rural areas?
Is it true that a white farmer could go to the local prison and pay the authorities to give him a handful of kaffir prisoners to come and work on his farm, with no pay, and send them back to the prison when the task at hand had been performed to his satisfaction?
Because some of these memories – true as they are – are so painful to recount, I sometimes tell my young listeners what we used to do back then in order to “arm” ourselves intellectually.
Girls my age turned to the pages of Mills and Boon novels as their own form of escape from the harsh realities around them. In the pages of those romance books, they would be transported to beautiful lands where a poor girl’s preoccupation in life was the pursuit of love, pure and simple.
A Mills and Boon’s man would break the girl’s heart by falling for the tricks of a scheming girl, a third party in the triangle.
The book would then dwell on how the spurned girl worked hard at winning back the heart of her beau. Towards the end of the book, the young man would recognise the error of his ways, come back to his original girlfriend, and they would live happily ever after. While the young girl reader’s nose was buried in the book, her own father would be missing in action – sowing his wild oats all over, while her mother would be breaking her back trying to raise the girl and her siblings. Without the escapist world of Mills and Boon, the girl in question could have gone mad.
What about us, boys, what did we do? Because they are creatures of action, to escape the realities around them, boys would go to the bioscope to watch Baasbenza and Terensiya (Bud Spencer and Terence Hill), a formidable gun-slinging duo who featured in a series of movies of the Wild West.
If not a western movie, then we would be watching Bruce Lee or some other martial arts hero.
At the end of the movie, every boy felt like he was an African version of Bruce Lee. We felt strong, reborn – and far removed from the fact that some of us had fathers languishing in jail for their political activities.
Later on boys being the late bloomers that they are, also discovered the allure of books. They started reading the likes of Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Peter Abrahams, Ayi Kwei Armah, and began to realise that books also had heroes we could look up to; heroes who taught us that we could pick up arms against the Boers who held our fathers prisoner.
The movies and the books not only offered an escape from the painful reality, but they also sharpened our powers of imagination.
These reminiscences were sparked by a comment made by my good friend JJ Tabane on his late night talk show on Power FM, when he jokingly asked why the likes of me were writing novels when current reality was so juicy it didn’t need to be exaggerated?
He was right. Who would have thought that a civilised country like ours could produce a scandal of the proportions of Life Esidimeni? We are drowning under the deluge of reports about the wars at Sars, the war between ministers Bathabile Dlamini and Pravin Gordhan, the war at the SABC, debilitating xenophobic explosions, ANC infighting. Phew, I could go on!
Journalists are spoilt for choice! But to the proverbial person in the street, it can be highly depressing stuff. Not the same levels of depression that we felt under apartheid, but unnerving nevertheless.
This is where novels come in. Through novels, readers enter alternative realities. They take a break from the fetid stench of corruption around them.
Their imagination gets sharpened and they get to imagine new possibilities for themselves – not unlike those children who whetted their imagination through the pages of Mills and Boon, or through the works of Achebe.
Through Shakespeare’s and Machiavelli’s fictions, we now understand how power works, and how it is used.
Fiction is possibly the highest form of alternative reality that can be put to use to reverse prevailing reality.
Franz Fanon and Aime Cesare, who are interestingly back in fashion, were great believers in the power of this alternative reality as a way of fighting back.
When we read fiction, we are only recharging our intellectual batteries – so we can fight back another day.
“To escape harsh realities around them, boys would go to bioscope