Spiritual path leads to healing

RUMOURS Mangane Wally Serote

Penguin

REVIEW: Ken Barris

KEKE is a former MK commander, more recently the chief executive of a cell-phone company. The novel opens with his life in ruins, seemingly because his wife has left him. He walks away from his job, rapidly develops a drinking problem and loses his car, house and contact with his children.

He is not only homeless: the essence of the matter is that Keke has lost all connection with his roots, with his identity. Through a chance encounter he meets Ami, a shaman from Mali, who gradually leads him to healing. She articulates a key insight for the novel, namely that Keke’s depression is a symptom of societal rather than individual concerns.

“How can society be normal after you’ve just fought for over 300 years, during the last 50 of which you were being annihilated by apartheid?” she asks. “All of you, whites as well as blacks, have been injured spiritually.”

Keke joins Ami in Mali, where she takes him to the homestead of her father Kanore, a spiritual healer. Kanore guides Keke through rituals and ceremonies that enable him to engage consciously – for the first time in his life – with his ancestors.

Keke’s trajectory gives voice to the argument that the devastation wreaked on individuals and society by apartheid cannot be automatically healed merely by its ending.

The seductions and coercions of the West have also made it vital for Africans to renegotiate their identity and culture. The implication is that healing will not be possible without integrating an original African spirituality, something untainted by the disaster of colonialism, into the tensions and opportunities of modernity.

In expressing her desire to foster the right kind of development for Africa, Ami remarks that “I must find a way to shape my thought into a dream that can become reality”. Rumours is troubled by the relationship between thought and dream.

A political novel needs to weave narrative and discourse together subtly and proportionately. Serote unfortunately uses dialogue to excess, hammering out ideas already depicted in the events and embedded in character, at great length and with much repetition. The characters threaten to become talking heads that endlessly repeat their positions, much like a panel discussion on television.

This tendency to ramble spoils a fine quality of the novel, namely its articulation of a more interconnected and organic world, one in which nature, people and spirit are not split off or hidden from each other.

A further problem lies in the direction of thought. I was reminded of Binyavanga Wainaina’s article “How to write about Africa”, which satirises the stereotypes and clichés that Western writers use to represent life on the continent. Except in reverse – this could be “How to write about the West”.

For example, the “typical American” is described as “upholding the dollar, the eagle, the American dream, ruling the world by death, killer toys and all”.

I am not sure how this differs from describing “the typical Muslim” as a terrorist

Whites are otherised as obstructive, racist, and opposed to reconciliation

bomber or “the typical Jew” as an international capitalist bent on controlling the world. In Serote’s book, the South African media are mouthpieces of Western hegemony.

No consideration is given to the possibility that media criticism of the ANC might be justified in some cases, or motivated by anything other than resentment at the loss of white privilege.

The existence of black commentators is dismissed with predictable deftness: they’re not truly African. And apart from one good white man who has a serious relationship with an African sex worker, whites are repetitively otherised as obstructive, racist, and generally opposed to reconciliation.

Despite the nationalist tenor of Rumours, there is a motif of anxiety, indeed of despair, about the direction taken by the country. Serote is troubled that post-colonial society is so riven with selfdestructive tendencies, but his perplexity is ambivalent, torn between the dream of freedom and evidence of its corruption.

This ambivalence is shown in the curious formulation, one which begs a question or two: “There was nothing wrong with the Movement (the ANC), he concluded; the problem was with its members.”

It is consistent with the troubled ending, in which an enigmatic young man named Job tells Keke that “the Movement is already for sale”. Although, in response, Keke is “deeply unsettled by the confidence with which this young man had spoken”, he is unable to disbelieve the assertion.

More positively, the ending also includes the restoration of Keke to communion with his family. Whatever the problems of the country, Serote seems to say, it is only at the level of ordinary people that wholeness can be restored.

Barris is an author. His novel Life Underwater won this year’s University of Johannesburg literary award.