This is the first of three instalments on Bloke Modisane. The other two will follow a week apart. Siphiwo Mahala provided footnotes.
“Death is never familiar and each death has its own special pain, each pain kills a little something in us, and I have looked upon death masks so often there is nothing left in me to be hurt by it.”
Bloke Modisane’s Blame me on history is, unfortunately, a text mentioned (or briefly quoted) far more often than it is read. True, its sweeping declarations of black rage against the backdrop of apartheid wield a devastating impact. But the excerpt above – and others like it – points to something more haunting still. They remind us of contradictions that run through the whole work – contradictions that Modisane reveals carefully, methodically and to devastating effect.
Modisane here is reflecting on his father, beaten to death by one of his neighbours in Sophiatown, the result of a dispute whose details remain unknown. If we pause on this statement, we become less and less certain of what Modisane means. “Death is never familiar” – and yet it cannot hurt him? If it cannot hurt him, what is its “special pain”?
In Blame me on history, we often see Modisane traversing this razor edge. Because he knows we expect him to, he bares his chest before us and shows the grisly depth of his wounds. At the same time, he cannot allow his injuries to incapacitate him, to disqualify him from narrating his own pain. He must perform a constant demonstration of himself as a man at the nadir of human endurance – bleeding out on the road but still shouting, not yet delirious and not yet unconscious.
October of last year seemed like a good time to revisit Blame me on history. I had sound professional reasons for doing this: Modisane was a prominent journalist for Drum magazine and Golden City Post in the 1950s, and I’m currently writing the biography of another important Drum alumnus, Casey Motsisi.
Josias Dos Moleele as Langston Hughes and Anele Nene as Bloke Modisane in Bloke & his American Bantu at the 2022 National Arts Festival (Photo: Izak de Vries)
What’s more, I’ve been teaching a class at my university this semester on US-South African historical encounters, and Modisane is also relevant to that discussion. Siphiwo Mahala’s Bloke and his American bantu, which debuted at the 2022 National Arts Festival, explores the profound bond Modisane shared with an ageing Langston Hughes. As Mahala put it in a recent lecture at Johns Hopkins University, Hughes was in contact with dozens of Africa’s most ambitious writers in the 1950s and 1960s, but there was clearly something special about his friendship with Modisane. Reading Blame me on history, it’s easy to see why Langston Hughes formed such high expectations of Modisane, who sadly only ever published one book.
October 2023 was, as we know, a month of unimaginable pain in its own right. Hamas fighters mounted a shock surprise attack on Israel from the battered and blockaded Gaza Strip, and once the initial tragedy of death and hostage-taking had run its course, the Israeli counter-assault continued to produce prolonged agony, still with no clear end in sight for either side. As an American, my taxpayer dollars have underwritten much of what’s happened over the past three months – a fact I’m made painfully aware of when I see snippets of the devastation on social media.
It’s easy to imagine Modisane’s Sophiatown – Modisane’s birthplace whose destruction frames the text – as Gaza or Khan Younis. The rhetoric of removals and buffers and security is more overt, but only slightly. Modisane’s words:
Nothing in my life seemed to have any meaning, all around me there was the futility and the apathy, the dying of the children, the empty gestures of the life reflected in the seemingly meaningless destruction of that life, the demolition of Sophiatown. …[1]
It became a mounting difficulty for me – even with all my own imperfections – to continue living in the same world with these people. We could not look at the same thing together. I found it disjointed …
Then it happened, I mean the action which has caused the death of many people in countless riots; it is not an act of bravery, of reckless courage, nor definitely one of stupidity. It is an action which shows man as a complicated set of responses capable – under normal circumstances – of reactions within a normal range of experiences, but beyond a certain limit of endurance of losing control of his rationale, shouting like Laertes:
To hell, allegiance! Vows, to the blackest devil!
Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation: – to this point I stand, –
That both the worlds I give to negligence,
Let come what comes; only I’ll be revenged…
As revelatory as it is to read Modisane as he wrestles with the necessity of violence, the need to flee and his complicated social entanglements across the colour line, it also feels indulgent to read it at a distance. Susan Sontag would call it prurient. Nyasha Mboti, in volume one of his monumental Apartheid studies: A manifesto, indicts people like me who take an unusual interest in these landscapes of suffering. “If you are not a tourist to apartheid, then please show us your silicosis!” he demands. “Whereabouts are your diseased lungs? Show us your dompas!”
But then, of course, Blame me on history was written for people like me – white people, people in America, people not experiencing the pain itself. Modisane puts his agony deliberately on display for people who ill-understand him and who will never understand him – still less now that the Sophiatown he knew has been gone for almost 70 years (although the area was rechristened Sophiatown in 2006, only a handful of buildings remain from the old suburb).[2] And yet, Blame me on history has been rebooted just this year in a new edition from Jonathan Ball.
Back to Gaza, 2023-24. “The task of the Palestinian,” writes Hala Alyan, “is to audition for empathy and compassion. To prove that we deserve it.” The Palestinian writer Karim Kattan goes even further in an essay for The Baffler. Recalling a conversation after 7 October with the organiser of a literary conference in Austria, Kattan’s words directly echo Blame me on history. For the Western media, Gaza is an “abstraction”, whose destruction “comes at the hands of a natural, impersonal force”, strangely foreordained.
“The world itself echoed in this voice on the phone,” Kattan writes, reflecting on the carefully curated words of the conference organiser:
There is a solution, if only you weren’t so stubborn, there is a solution, which is to vanish within the contradictions wrought upon you; if only you could disinvite yourself from the world, if only you did not complicate the world with your existence, if only I did not have to talk to you, if only I did not have to listen to you, if only.
Blame Hamas, blame Isis, blame Netanyahu, blame the Islamists, blame the Republicans, blame the misogynists, blame the Holocaust, blame the settlers. It’s everyone’s responsibility and therefore nobody’s responsibility.
This is how Modisane puts it: “[W]hen everybody has blamed it on somebody else – and the more charitable have blamed it on history – the police would feel justified to launch the reprisal raids.”
Kattan’s use of the word solution there is obviously full of significance. People as abstractions, “questions”, subject to “solutions” – this is the original sin of the whole conflict in Israel and Palestine. Apartheid was also conceived as a kind of final solution.
We know what has transpired in the 60 years since Blame me on history’s publication. We know, albeit imperfectly, how things ended up in South Africa. We have no idea how things are ultimately going to look in the Holy Land, but I believe we can use Blame me on history as a text to think about the durability of the human spirit, how to be witnesses to pain, and how to be witnesses who are also implicated in that pain. In the next two essays in this series, I intend to explore these possibilities further.
Notes by Siphiwo Mahala
[1] Black people were relocated from Sophiatown to other areas in Johannesburg (in line with the Group Areas Act), where they were allocated land according to ethnicity.
[2] Sophiatown was demolished (and renamed Triomf – Afrikaans for “triumph”) in the 1950s, as he writes in Blame me on history, and the name was reinstated after the demise of apartheid.
Parts 2 and 3
Revisiting Bloke Modisane, from Sophiatown to Gaza: #2 On violence, on history
Revisiting Bloke Modisane, from Sophiatown to Gaza: #III – On escape
See also
Press release: The launch of Can Themba, the making and breaking of the intellectual tsotsi