Siphokazi Magadla, The Con
The Texture of Shadows by
Mandla Langa is set in 1989 South Africa, amid murmurs of Nelson Mandela’s
release from prison and the unbanning of national liberation movements by the
apartheid state. Not knowing how events will unfold in the country, a group of
guerillas of the People’s Army in Angola are infiltrated as couriers carrying a
trunk with highly classified contents that could potentially put the lives of
those in the liberation movement in jeopardy if it were to land up in the wrong
hands.
It is through the events
that unfold during the journey to deliver the trunk that we are introduced to
the individual guerillas and the horrors of life in Angola, which include a
People’s Army that is involved in the torture of its own people. We are also
introduced to individuals within the country who are trusted to keep the
guerillas safe, as well as the tensions that exist between those who went into
exile and those who remained in the country – the exiles and the “inziles”, the
guerilla and the political prisoner — are explored carefully, and neither side
emerges morally superior in claiming a greater role in the defeat of apartheid.
It becomes clear that the guerillas are being followed by members of the
apartheid counterinsurgency unit who wish to get hold of the contents of the
trunk. We are also introduced to the personalities who make up the apartheid
death camp – here the face of evil is exposed as complicated and not easily
reducible to moral binaries. None of the characters in this drama allow easy
descriptions because there is a fine line between good and evil for those in
the underbelly of the war against apartheid.
In this book, Langa
articulates the complexities and contradictions of the anti-apartheid struggle
through a beautifully crafted narrative that is loyal to the development of the
interior lives of the characters, and, often, only a novel permits this. I
appreciate that Langa, a former guerilla himself, chose the novel as a form to
disrupt the archive on the anti-apartheid struggle.
As important as the
biographical work of the anti-apartheid struggle is, and we do have a
respectable body of writing on it, the limits of that work, often, the
attention given to chronology and accuracy of “historical events as they
happened” often denies us the space to focus on how the people who experienced
the events felt about them, and it denies space to tell different versions of
the struggle. In The Work of the Nation: Heroic Masculinity in South African
Autobiographical Writing of the Anti‐Apartheid Struggle, Elaine Unterhalter
rightly notes that the exercise of writing one’s life into political struggle
means that “no new version of history can be given, because it is the received
version that has driven the commitment and heroism of the authors”. This allows
only the telling of “a particular history of the liberation struggle”, which
“entails giving oneself to the struggle and reforming oneself in that process”
in which the reward is a future history of victory.
In The Site of Memory,
novelist Toni Morrison reminds us that the biography carries weight for black
people fighting against slavery and colonial occupation. For black people, the
biography does two things: it says, “This is my historical life – my singular,
special example that this is personal, but that also represents the race”; and
that “I write this text to persuade other people – you, the reader, who is
probably not black – that we are human beings worthy of God’s grace and the
immediate abandonment of slavery”. So the importance of the biography as a form
of writing back to white supremacy cannot be taken for granted.
What I value of the
novel, as Morrison notes elsewhere , is that the novel is generous in that it
“is tailored to the character’s thoughts or actions in a way that flags him or
her and provides irony, sometimes humour”. The novel allows us to push against
the restrictions of time and language. The obsession with time and accuracy
often denies us the opportunity to feel.
A character in The
Texture of Shadows reflects on the limitations of language when it comes to
articulating experiences of violation:
When she reflects on it,
it’s all too late. It’s as if it all never happened and she is left with
memories, snatches of remembered dialogue, colour, and feeling – especially
feeling. Even in the most urgent probing, an interrogation that approximates a
session before a panel of torturers, all she can come up with is a series of
incidents all connected to her flesh. She remembers things in terms of her
body’s recollection of texture, pressure, smell and colour – and of course,
taste. These senses operated independently of her conscious understanding of
things. There were times of pain, sometimes pleasure; she was back in those
days – in that past which she had no volition – like the woman she had read
about who could only start understanding that she had been violated in a shack
somewhere near the sea when she heard the call of seagulls.
Such moments in the book
reminded me of Nthabiseng Motsemme’s work on the silence of black women in the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, what she defines as “an encounter with
unspeakability”. Motsemme argues that the “TRC assumed that the world was only
knowable through words, and thus the basis for beginning a process of healing
South Africa’s violent past would be organised through acts of testimony”. She
then asks, “What happens when those who have been denied the occasion to tell
their stories, and whose bodies and cultures have been systematically violated
and dehumanised, discover that there are things that remain unspeakable?”
Perhaps in those stolen
moments – between Laura Mdunge and Thulasizwe Ngobese, to Strella’s battle with
the ghost of Mabitla, Strella’s genius and terror, Chaplain Nerissa’s clarity
in a world of chaos, which deny us the ability to look at the past in simple
terms, and robs us of the closure we need with the past in order to believe
that the future upon us is bright – in the “devastating patience” that is
demanded on us, we find a language for the things that cannot be said. As is it
said in the book, “while the future is certain, it’s the past that remains
unpredictable”.
Furthermore, while
revolutionary struggle means that the characters in the book walk side by side
with death, there is careful and utterly delicious attention given to desire
and intimacy amid daily betrayal and violence. Tupac Shakur pointed out long
ago that “thugs get lonely, too”. In this novel, desire is complicated and at
times fatal, but it is not suspended in times of revolution.
We are also shown the
possibilities of a transgressive and equitable love in the long-standing
relationship between Nerissa and Georgina in one of the few books of this
period that pays attention to struggle as a gendered process that affects men
and women in particular ways.
In her visceral review,
Makhosazana Xaba wrote that Jacob Dlamini’s book Askari “adds to a growing
subcategory of books about the struggle that present readers with layered
complexity”. These books that make the stomach turn – such as Stephen Ellis’
External Mission: The ANC in Exile, or Paul Trewhla’s Inside Quatro: Uncovering
the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO, or Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba’s Comrades
Against Apartheid – all force us to deal with the unsightly legacy of
revolution. None of the events in this novel surprise in the difficult reality
that they depict, because all of these books deal with the contradictions of
revolution: betrayal, terror and, importantly, with what Dlamini defines as the
“fatal intimacies” that defined the struggle.
Langa’s invitation for us
to (re)consider the shadows belongs in this important archive.
As Xaba concludes in her
review, this literature “screams, limbs in the air, demanding attention … It
reminds us that the unexpected and often inexplicable demand our prodding.”
