From Johannesburg: October 1981

Johannesburg

14.10.81

Dear Mum,
I have received all letters bar one from Dad. W.r.t. Pam I have been told that Wilbur Smith like Doris Lessing is a Rhodesian. Anyway his books are not about contemporary SA. Nadine Gordimer is reported to be the best SA novelist writing in and about SA. I prefer J.M. Coetzee and one of his books “Waiting for the Barbarians.”

I did a course on SA lit at the Uni and a lot of SA literature is rank with little intrinsic value and no relevance to a different time and place. A lot of the potentially best artists have left the country. If they still write about the country (a lot don’t) they seem full of guilt and trying to get SA out of their system and they over-react.

The whole history of the Afrikanner is one of never conceding defeat and fighting the dreaded colonial powers. i.e. On the plane trip Breaker Morant was shown as an in-flight movie and was described as an Australian film about the colonial powers being nasty to the Boers. In one paper the rugby tour was described as the second Great Trek. You would think that the more you isolate these proud paranoid people the less the chance of change. (The lager mentality) Most Afrikanners will tell you that our internal problems are ours to solve. We don’t tell you what to do. You play sport against Russia etc. They have nothing but contempt for demonstrators in distant lands.

I think that any demonstrator who is violent or says that all SA’s are racist/uncivilized is no better than some SA’s who say that all blacks are hopeless kaffirs. They belong together with the racist blacks.

You ask what languages do the blacks speak. The blacks are divided into about 6 different tribes with different languages, customs etc. and are just as divided as the whites. In Soweto the main languages are Zulu and Sotho. It’s the same problem all over Africa. Most countries contain a number of tribes which have been arbitrarily been grouped together by the West. Most of the trouble in Zimbabwe, Uganda, Nigeria, Ethiopia etc. is due to tribal fighting.

A lot of people say that a Western Style democracy doesn’t work in Africa where strong leadership is needed and where tribalism is still very strong. You could blame the whites for coming and going and leaving behind a system that doesn’t work without them or you could blame the blacks. You hear many stories from the whites about the way the Blacks have disorganized and botched the administration of countries like Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe etc. but c’est la vie.

Regards Alan