- PenAfrican is Mphuthumi Ntabeni's regular column for LitNet.
Title: Place
Author: Justin Fox
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
ISBN: 9781415211069
As an African, my default Weltanschauung is communal. I always feel rubbed the wrong way by any liberal worldview which is radically individual. The politically correct liberal will tell me that there’s no negation of the collective in emphasising the individual as the basis of observation and analysis. And, after all, reading and writing is a subjective prerogative. This is probably why Justin Fox introduces his almost wanderlust-centred book, Place: South African literary journeys, with this caveat: “My choices of literary works are all about places of the heart, both for the authors and for myself. The selection is personal, reflecting my own literary and literal geographies.”
Fox goes on to argue, beautifully, that identity formation depends on the environment: place, people and era. In my opinion, this enforces the communal point of view, which sees one’s identity as a dialogical relationship with others, or as we say in Mzansi: Umntu ngumntu ngabantu! You are because others were/are before you. The “before” is a double-edged sword that refers to your ancestors and those literally before and around you. The Western version of what I’m trying to say is probably best depicted in books by the Scottish writer Robert Macfarlane, which share a similar love of landscapes, nature, people and place to that which is in this book by Fox.
Be that as it may, the collection of literary works Fox diagnoses here are those of: Olive Schreiner, Percy FitzPatrick, Deneys Reitz, Eugène Marais, Herman Charles Bosman, JM Coetzee, Dalene Matthee, Zakes Mda and Stephen Watson. I list them because in my youth, I would have disregarded – with contempt fostered by my Black Consciousness politics – most of these writers as dead white men. But age has humbled me. Age shepherds you back to the innocence of a child that has unbounded and unprejudiced curiosity. I’ve grown soft with fascination about all people’s points of view, even those I don’t agree with.
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Sitting at the fireplace of Victorian Manor Hotel on one of those rather bitterly cold Karoo nights, I flattered my imagination with the idea that Schreiner once sat before the same fire or on the stoep of the hotel, where, according to Fox, the farmers used to come for gossip and a sip of brandy; this made things come alive in a special way for me.
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I began reading Fox’s book on my first night at the Etienne van Heerden Soirée 2024 in Cradock. As my luck would have it, the first writer Fox deals with is Olive Schreiner. Sitting at the fireplace of Victorian Manor Hotel on one of those rather bitterly cold Karoo nights, I flattered my imagination with the idea that Schreiner once sat before the same fire or on the stoep of the hotel, where, according to Fox, the farmers used to come for gossip and a sip of brandy; this made things come alive in a special way for me. I didn’t go to the sarcophagus dome where her remains are buried with those of her husband, Samuel Cronwright, their baby and their dog. But, having visited it on a rather precarious 4x4 ride the previous year, I know what Fox is talking about when he mentions the teasing chill winds at the summit of Bankberg, and the rooigras and wild sage of Buffelskop, where my partner and I stayed on our previous visits. The Buffelskop farm, I discovered, is now where the contemporary farmers go for brandy and Coke, with the necessary gossip that follows.
Zakes Mda, as a fellow historical novelist, always interests me – even if, in a stereotypically younger and next-generation manner, I’m dissatisfied with his style of writing. As a Karoo boy, I readily identify with the writers Fox explores. It fascinates me into believing that there is indeed something in Alice Meynell’s The spirit of place which Fox says gets etched into one’s way of looking at the world earlier on as children. I find the Wild Coast and the picturesque Cape Town landscape, which Bra Zakes writes about, pretty. But they have very little spiritual invocation for me, like the brush and ruggedness of the Karoo do. This distinction I notice also when I visit the United Kingdom; I feel more at home in hale and hearty Caledonian land (Scotland) than luxuriant Éire (Ireland). Of course, it has long been decided by poets that, as Fox mentions also, landscapes shape our personalities.
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Of course, it has long been decided by poets that, as Fox mentions also, landscapes shape our personalities.
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Fox says that Deneys Reitz, whose book Commando: A Boer journal of the Boer War was published in 1929, is one of the first people to write about the South African War, which some call the Anglo-Boer War. It is the first book among the ones he talks about that triggered my interest. I am biased towards personal stories of individuals directly affected by historical events, especially with epigraphs like this: “A lamentable tale of things done long ago – and ill done.”
Fox says: “Reitz’s story is also implicitly a praise song to the South African landscape and the romance of roaming its wide-open spaces. In a sense, it’s our nation’s greatest ‘travelogue’: a tale of hardship, patriotism, honour and camaraderie set against the sublime backdrop that becomes as much a character as its participant.”
The writing tropes flip and turn with the writers Fox interrogates, until you feel them coalesce in JM Coetzee’s Life and times of Michael K:
- Can a foreign language represent properly an African landscape?
- Can we escape the tyrannies of modern life and civilisation through a peaceful farm life?
- What implications are there for a white person owning huge farmland in a sea of land-disposed black people?
- And what does it mean to be rooted in the land your ancestors robbed by violence from other people?
- What happens when the (mute silence) inferiority complex of the subjugated flares up in indiscriminate violence against the enforced hegemony, imperial plunder and colonial violence of the West?
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Place is a well-written page of South African literature form from its roots. It is mostly about white literature, or that which conforms to its understanding.
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Place is a well-written page of South African literature form from its roots. It is mostly about white literature, or that which conforms to its understanding. If you’re looking for a bracketing of that form, you’ll love this book more. But you won’t find as much diversity in it as in some of the books whose genealogy it shares, like Jeanette Eve’s A literary guide to the Eastern Cape: Places and the voices of writers. Eve’s book celebrates the poetry and prose of our country, her people and natural beauty in a much more diverse and inclusive way. Fox’s book is declaratory, self-indulgent and personal; as such, what it lacks in diversity is gained by profundity and consistency from a well-written disquisition.
Fox says, like Coetzee, he often flirted with thoughts of relocation. Of course, in South African white literature, living with the fear of barbarians at the gates is a common trope, even from before Coetzee’s Disgrace and Damon Galgut’s The promise. The stereotypical solution is migration, going back to the occidental coop where things are pally with their Western worldview. The updated novelistic treatment of this trope is in SJ Naudé’s book, Of fathers and fugitives, which invokes Ivan Turgenev’s timeless depiction of generational conflict during a charged era of social upheavals in Fathers and sons. It all makes me recall a Hebrew proverbial saying that their prophets (Jeremiah 31:29; Ezekiel 18:2) were fond of enacting: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, And the children’s teeth are set on edge.” For now, Fox, like me, seems to understand that there’s no place in the world that is able to scratch your itch for a sense of place, the landscape etched deep in your spirit, as a way of seeing the world: the place of the heart.
Also read:
PenAfrican: Call and response by Gothataone Moeng – a book review
Moederland: Nine daughters of South Africa by Cato Pedder: a book review