Revisiting Bloke Modisane, from Sophiatown to Gaza: #III – On escape

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Anele Nene as Bloke Modisane in Bloke & his American Bantu, a play by Siphiwo Mahala, at the 2022 National Arts Festival (Photo: Izak de Vries)

This is the third instalment on Bloke Modisane. Part I and part II are available.

When we left Bloke Modisane in the previous instalment of this essay series, he was announcing his difficult decision to leave South Africa, praying that the United States could afford him “some amount of time and a little freedom to reconstruct my battered soul”. Ironically, the person he names as his most direct inspiration is Ezekiel Mphahlele, who would famously return to apartheid South Africa in 1977 (the same year he changed his first name to Es’kia). Modisane himself would never again set foot on South African soil, and he clearly knew it.

In that essay, I sought to use Modisane’s reflections on violence to tease out a clearer concept of what he means by “history” in Blame me on history. I suggested that it might be useful to think of Modisane’s history like a kind of monstrous Large Language Model (LLM) – a bizarre and monstrous simulacrum of human intelligence trained on our basest reflexes and insecurities. When we commit ourselves to interrogating it, we become aware of how crude it is, and yet neither oppressor nor oppressed can hope to outwit it. To remain within its reach, according to Modisane, is to succumb.

Modisane guides us through the intricacies of Freedom Charter multiracialism and Pan-Africanism for pages and pages before choosing – somewhat unexpectedly – to flee.

Is escape actually possible? The purpose of this essay is to reflect further on this question.

Tembeka Ngcukaitobi (Foto: Izak de Vries)

As I write this, South Africa is being lauded in progressive circles for accusing Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice. “The destruction of Palestinian life,” as Tembeka Ngcukaitobi argued, “is articulated state policy.” Pressure continues to build on Joe Biden (my beleaguered president) to call for a ceasefire, and people continue to die in Gaza in appalling numbers. Many Israeli hostages remain in Hamas custody, and, extraordinarily, only one hostage has been rescued through military means since the beginning of Israeli ground operations. Israel continues to insist that its operations will not stop until the Gaza Strip is utterly purged of Hamas, even as the conflict widens to include Iran and Lebanon.

The Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands, the seat of the International Court of Justice (Photo: Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

On what ground can we meet each other, each of us who are implicated in such radically disparate ways? What’s the point of reading an account like Modisane’s polemic against apartheid or a dispatch from the war in Palestine? Even if I affirm that such-and-such is a tragedy, even if I personally decide to donate money or speak out against it in a certain way, I remain, by virtue of the basic facts of my life, implicated – a beneficiary, an accomplice. No matter how “aware” I become, unless I come to see it as a true matter of life and death, I eventually will surrender to those basic facts – my Americanness, my whiteness, my relative affluence, whatever you want to call it.

If this sounds like a tiresome confession of “privilege”, you’re not wrong. The obsessive pricking of one’s own conscience without transformative intent is masturbatory. This – as we shall see – is a fact of which Modisane is all too aware. But I must admit that I like Modisane’s concept of history better than the discourse of privilege we’ve gotten used to. Privileges don’t exist without first being granted by someone or something – Modisane’s concept of history insists that we must name this strange entity and keep it at the centre of our thinking.

Modisane also recognises that it’s as easy and tempting to blame “history” as it is to sweep “privilege” under the rug. The self-training machine that Modisane calls “history” atomises us. It reduces the scope of our manoeuvre to a dialogue with inevitability. Call it Blame-GPT.

Blame me on history is perhaps best known for its indictment of the emptiness at the heart of liberal efforts to defy apartheid in the 1950s. The Drum boys’ notorious drunken parties and violations of the Immorality Act failed to transcend the realities of apartheid, eliminating the possibility of a non-cataclysmic end to the system. Ultimately, however, Modisane exercises greater concern for the way apartheid poisons relationships at a personal level, close to the ground – how even in defying its rules and regulations, white and black find each other paralysed by strange fears and rages, ultimately without peace and without community.

Against this backdrop, the fleeting glimmers of a better world feel even stranger. They become sources of disquiet rather than inspiration. Take Blame me on history’s account of Modisane’s wedding reception, as a white friend of Bloke’s seduces a police sergeant into the ultimate subversion:

For the first time in my life – presumably for any African – I was instrumental in causing a white policeman to commit an offense under the Liquor Act; I was fascinated by this power, and every time I held out my glass at him I chalked up another count against him. It took the sergeant a few glasses of brandy and some coaxing from Jeanne to release him from his Afrikaner chains, and we were to see a human being wriggle out of the uniform and the gun. Around ten o’clock there was an ease and charm about him, the gun belt had been loosened and the gun placed on the table, and the sergeant was talking, laughing, drinking, singing, and dancing as animatedly as Fiki and I.

For one beautiful moment in time, alcohol and flirtation remove the barriers between Modisane’s friends and the policeman. Centuries of accumulated history melt away in the night. It all feels so seamless, so easy. And yet, just four months later, Modisane’s world collapses when his colleague Henry Nxumalo is brutally murdered. He’s told about it just hours after spending a raucous New Year’s Eve at Nxumalo’s side. It’s in that moment that Modisane makes up his mind to leave South Africa forever. He hears bells already tolling for his body, and he chooses to gamble everything on escape.

In the final scene in Blame me on history, black children scramble to collect cast-off food thrown out the window of Modisane’s train on its way into Bechuanaland. Modisane is disgusted by the scene of white amusement and black abjection, comparing it to the “pecking of vultures”. But he ultimately joins in, throwing coins out his window at the kids. Then, as the train pulls out of South Africa entirely, he finds that he has not escaped from anything. “Like an orgasm in bed,” he writes, “the tension was released but the filth slimed down my thigh dripping onto the sheet.”

It’s a gripping and disturbing image of impotency – or rather misspent potency – that closes Blame me on history’s kaleidoscopic reflection on the apartheid experience. This is his last and maybe his biggest provocation – is everything we’ve just read just masturbation?

I started reading Blame me on history because I knew of its reputation as a classic. I kept reading when war broke out in the Holy Land, because I hoped it would provide some insight into the Gazan experience and how to respond ethically to the horrors of war. I approached Modisane ready to sit at his feet, but our relationship changed the longer I read. I imagined us walking side by side through a dim thicket of suffering, evasions and cowardice. He and I entered together, hoping perhaps to find Satan enthroned at the centre of it all, but instead we found a mere machine, an LLM – “history”. But no kill switch, no self-destruct.

Then, by different paths, we both tried desperately to run away.

See also:

Revisiting Bloke Modisane, from Sophiatown to Gaza: #1 On pain

Revisiting Bloke Modisane, from Sophiatown to Gaza: #2 On violence, on history

Power politics in the Middle East: How the global North-South divide capitalises on trauma

Oor Patrick J Petersen | Etienne van Heerden Veldsoirée 2023

Conversations beyond the comfort zone | Etienne van Heerden Veldsoirée 2023

On land, constitutional law and social justice | Etienne van Heerden Veldsoirée 2023

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