This is the second of three instalments on Bloke Modisane. The next one will appear in the coming week. Siphiwo Mahala provided footnotes.
In my last essay on Bloke Modisane’s Blame me on history, I reflected on the strangeness of revisiting this text amid the backdrop of the war in Gaza. It disturbs our peace twice over: first by the details of actual violence and suffering, and second by an awareness of our own complicit presence amid these events.
In this instalment, I want to continue that discussion, with special reference to the way Modisane talks about violence – first, the violence he suffers as a black man in apartheid-era South Africa, and finally the spectre of decolonial violence – violence he is ultimately able to elude by leaving the country. In thinking about violence and his response to it, we come to a stronger understanding of what Modisane means by “history” – that nebulous thing which Modisane’s title asks us to blame.
Violence is present from the first page of Blame me on history, which is framed around Modisane’s experience of the annihilation of his birthplace, Sophiatown. “In the name of slum clearance,” we read, “they had brought the bulldozers and gored into her body.” The demolition equipment acts as both a literal and a figurative leveller, producing a sort of literary symmetry: “Sophiatown was like one of its own many victims,” Modisane writes, “a man gored by the knives of Sophiatown, lying in the open gutters, a raisin in the smelling drains, dying of multiple stab wounds, gaping wells gushing forth blood, the look of shock and bewilderment, of horror and incredulity, the face of the dying man.”
“A raisin in the smelling drains”? Here, Modisane directly references his friend and mentor Langston Hughes’s famous poem “Harlem”:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
What happens to hope repeatedly dashed by violence? Concentrated, ripened, focused, cultivated, shrivelled, parched, impotent, cut off from its own destiny to disappear into the blistering heat of Manhattan asphalt or an open sewer in the Western Areas. Hughes’s last line is the sting in the tail: “Or does it explode?” How could it not?
It would be vastly oversimplifying things to reduce Blame me on history to a meditation on “Harlem”, but that question – “Or does it explode?” – pervades everything that follows. Modisane feels the answer to the final line is yes, and writes about leaving South Africa as if he himself risks exploding if he stays (the connection to martyrdom – to Gaza – revealing itself once again).
For Modisane, everything except the nonhuman landscape of South Africa deserves total destruction. “The attitudes,” he admits, “are bigger than we are and perhaps we might have to destroy ourselves if we are to get at them.” Short of that, the best option is to destroy the South Africa of the soul, and the necessary first step to accomplishing this is to leave – a departure that Modisane describes as identical to “running away from the sight of death”, the blood of self and others having already “curled on the skin”.
Flight is an unsatisfying response. Modisane himself concedes this in another place, in an article he wrote for the New Statesman, called “Why I ran away”. “I am a coward,” Modisane says, “because I love humanity more than I hate oppression.”
Thus the text leaves us at a dead end. As we regard his situation from our positions of relative distance and privilege 70 years on, we naturally press for answers, solutions, a programme, reassurance. We want to know that we or the things we cherish would have been safe when the flood came. As Modisane reminds us, this exposes the narrow self-seeking at the heart of many of these conversations. But it’s also not his to say who will lose, and how. Modisane may not even be able to save himself, after all – let alone others. Something beyond human agency is at work here. Blame it on history.[1]
It reminds me of AI Large Language Models (LLM), this force that Modisane calls “history”. Modisane’s white liberal friends emerge in the text desperate to plead their own case, to be treated as individuals, sui generis – ignorant of the fact that circumstances have changed, white supremacy has made this impossible. The same mysterious force that has annihilated Africans’ individuality, according to Modisane, will come for the whites by and by, and no amount of special pleading will be able to assuage it.
Though supremely impersonal, somehow this LLM of history is our own creation. Possessing no insights of its own, it nevertheless projects a remarkable illusion of wisdom based on the troves of data on which it has been trained. Possessing no actual intellect, it can only predict words and thought patterns and tactics – reproducing itself unto oblivion, simplifying all of our lives.
Modisane’s history still operates the way it did back in the 1950s – on the street and in the media and in our cultural products. But it functions in new ways, too. Social media algorithms are the most obvious example: the attitudes and prejudices and pain points of our world are now automatically curated and beamed into your pocket. They indelibly shape the way we see the world. Conspiracy theories like flat earth and QAnon are deservedly infamous, but at some point or another most of us have assimilated some kind of algorithmic distortion into our worldview. The question is ultimately a simple one: which groups of people has social media made it harder for you to see as fully human?
To blame it on the algorithm is to blame it on history. But what can one do? Chapter 14 of Blame me on history exemplifies the dilemma beautifully. Modisane forcefully critiques and rejects the multiracial politics of the African National Congress, muses aloud about the possibility of having to kill his white friends, extols the clarity of Pan-Africanists in embracing violent resistance, and then – vows to leave the country.[2] “I wanted a little peace,” he tells us, for him and his family. He shrinks back from revolutionary action just as his restlessness reaches fever pitch.
Before we choose to condone some dimension of the violence surrounding us – whether that violence is apartheid or the war in Gaza, or our complicity in the war in Gaza, or something else – we’re cowards or hypocrites, contemptible. But afterwards? We’ve lost something of ourselves. We’ve obeyed the crushing pressure of history, this monstrous force yearning to pulse through us. Hypocrisy and cowardice, normally markers of self-delusion, at least preserve the fiction of our own autonomy amid all this.
“Or does it explode?” – Hughes’s question again. It certainly can. More often than it should. Or, on the other hand, maybe not often enough?
It seeks an escape. Explosion is escape. Decay is also escape, as in Modisane’s image of the raisin in the drain. And sex is escape – in fact, maybe sex is the best escape of all, an act of interpersonal connection and creation. In my next essay, I will be exploring the ways Blame me on history approaches this possibility.
Notes by Siphiwo Mahala
[1] I think reading “Why I ran away” would further augment this section. It’s published in Langston Hughes’s An African treasury.
[2] For context, it might help to mention the dehumanising effects of apartheid – the midnight police raids, with his half-naked wife having to cower – the point at which he vows not to let his daughter grow up in slavery conditions.
See also:
Revisiting Bloke Modisane, from Sophiatown to Gaza: #1 On pain
Revisiting Bloke Modisane, from Sophiatown to Gaza: #III – On escape