The history of man
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
ISBN 9781485904212
Penguin
This novel is no less than an act of extraordinary grace by the author.
It takes a minor yet significant character from her award-winning and hypnotically beautiful first novel, The theory of flight, and presents his story front and centre. Not a sequel, nor really a prequel – there is some overlap and interleaving with her first book. In one chapter, we see events identical to those of the first novel, but told from the perspective of such a different witness as to render the material completely fresh. So, while I strongly recommend reading anything this writer produces (I’d read her shopping lists if I could), it is not necessary to have read The theory of flight to appreciate The history of man.
The novel is indeed about history. It tells the personal history of a “man of the empire”, Emil Coetzee – born in Durban, raised at the foot of the Matopos Hills in what was then colonial Rhodesia, sent to the Selous School for Boys to “become a man” – and his founding of and work for the initially neutral but increasingly sinister Organisation of Domestic Affairs.
It presents not only Emil’s history, including his own domestic affairs (every word in this book is freighted) – his doomed passion for his best friend’s wife, his hollow marriage, his failed relationship with his adored son – but also his Great Idea, his project of “creating histories” for the “natives” or “Africans” (who, of course, already have their own histories, invisible to the settler administrators) so that they are unable to fall between the cracks of colonial bureaucracy.
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It does so with such clarity, insight and attentiveness that it is impossible not to be impressed by the generosity of the authorial voice, which retells the tragedy of Rhodesia-Zimbabwe without urgency, anguish or rage.
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And, in outlining both these projects, The history of man recounts the colonial history of Rhodesia. It does so with such clarity, insight and attentiveness that it is impossible not to be impressed by the generosity of the authorial voice, which retells the tragedy of Rhodesia-Zimbabwe without urgency, anguish or rage. And tragedy it is, rendered all the graver by the measured tone and pace of the writing.
One irony is that Emil’s project of recording and archiving the “native population” is what makes him the “man of the hour” when the civil war begins. Rutherford, Emil’s traditionalist friend, tells him: “You stumbled on the very thing that the country needs to successfully fight the terrorists …. You will become a man of history.”
This project of history, no matter how nobly begun, is perverted along the way, both in the case of the organisation and in Emil’s personal journey to the heart of darkness. This latter trope is indeed summoned and inverted to show the depravity to which the colonial project leads in this case: civil war, torture in rooms with sinks for the washing away of blood, a civilian population ground to powder between security forces and guerrillas, citizens of neighbouring countries slaughtered. Ndlovu does not belabour these facts; she allows them to speak for themselves.
Along the way, we are reminded that history has the potential to humanise, to insist that we recognise one another. The author does exactly this in making the hated, feared and even monstrous Emil of The theory of flight the flawed hero of The history of man – a human being possessed of too much rather than too little feeling.
But, by the same token, erasure of history is necessary for violence and warfare to succeed as colonial strategies: “Naming the dead black bodies would make it difficult to kill them with the kind of blind gusto that was necessary during a time of war … it is very difficult to kill someone whose name and history you know.”
While The theory of flight is a novel of the post-colony, The history of man is a tale of colony, of an era when, according to one of the “Masters” (another freighted word) of the Selous School for Boys, “commerce was the hallmark of a civilisation and capitalism the hallmark of a superior civilisation”.
In the very first chapter, the reader learns that “Emil was six years old when he, at that moment master of all he surveyed, beheld the veld and fell in love with it”. This theme, used to chart the complexity of settler relations with land they have invaded, is handled with almost unsettling insight. There is an uncomfortable truth here about the degree to which love plays as important a role as greed and entitlement in colonial dispossession. And it is here that the shadows first fall – literally: “… he only felt at peace when he glanced down at the black shadow that he cast over the veld and felt it connect him to all that surrounded him … it was there that he truly belonged …. It was there that he was at home.”
The symbolism of the black shadow that Emil casts on the places (and over the people) he loves most resonates throughout the novel, a deceptively simple but pliable metaphor. Perhaps it appears in its most devastating form in his later inability to hear or understand the words of the chief of a village intended for resettlement so that white commercial farmers can take over their land: “[The chief] talked of the land as theirs … as the land of their ancestors … as the land of their children and their children’s children …. The villagers were mere custodians of the land, inheriting it from past generations and holding it in trust for future generations, and that, as such, they could not give the land away because they did not have the power to do so.” But the villagers are, of course, rounded up and carted away: “… to the colonial government, there was little difference between them and the objects they possessed”.
The novel is also a study in how toxic masculinity – if that is not rapidly becoming an overused phrase – is encouraged, cultivated and established, often with the best of intentions, with a clear link between patriarchy and the colonial project. Here, Ndlovu’s insight is crystalline: “When a man finds himself suddenly doing the wrong thing, he prefers to believe that he has always been capable of such an act because it saves him from having to truly investigate the when, how and why of his becoming capable.” This sentence explains more about patriarchal violence – sexual, economic, structural, imposed with naked fists or weapons – as well as our inability to look honestly at the roots of that violence, than a dozen sociology texts.
The author quite deliberately eschews the serpentine spirals of her first novel; in the prologue, Emil himself insists that his story be told “chronologically in a linear fashion, with a definite beginning, middle and end”. And yet, the structure is not quite that simple: the prologue also introduces the letters and notes that have marked Emil’s life in the most significant ways as a series of clues, so that we follow these breadcrumbs through the woods (or the elephant grass, rather) of the tale. And the story is bookended by a series of repetitions that might have fallen flat in the hands of a less skilled writer, but which make for a dazzling finish in this case.
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Both books conveyed to me the unusual sensation that I was not reading, but being read to, a testament to the effortlessness of Ndlovu’s style, her poetic use of repetition, the flow of her sentences.
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Without the magic realism that made The theory of flight so beguiling, this novel is not another work of what reader Penny Haw calls “revolutionary mysticism”. It remains utterly absorbing nonetheless. Both books conveyed to me the unusual sensation that I was not reading, but being read to, a testament to the effortlessness of Ndlovu’s style, her poetic use of repetition, the flow of her sentences. She is a mistress of weaving together the intimate, the domestic and the devastating: “[Emil’s mother] was cock-eyed or rather kokayi … a word that the villagers who worked in the industries of the City of Kings had brought back with them … in the same way that they had brought back mirrors, tins of that greatest creation of them all, condensed milk, and the knowledge that the Europeans, using a highly esoteric system, had deemed them to be an inferior species of human.”
The simplicity of Ndlovu’s style is so lulling that one finds oneself having to pause and reread lines to appreciate their impact: “Emil stood up to go, aware that his glass was not the only thing that was empty.”
When a book is this good, I’m always delighted when production standards match the content. The first person the author thanks in her acknowledgements is her editor, Jenefer Shute. Although excellent editing is by definition invisible, I was nevertheless hugely impressed by the high polish of both Ndlovu’s texts, and I have little doubt that not only Shute, but also the production team at Umuzi/PRHSA (Catriona Ross and Fourie Botha), had a hand in this. Gretchen van der Byl has made a name for herself as that rare gem, a cover designer who clearly reads manuscripts closely and with insight, and I find myself poring over her covers because they often prompt me to consider elements of the book I might have bypassed.
The history of man is not just an excellent book; it is a necessary one. Read it.
See also:
The African Library: The theory of flight by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
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