African tragedy: A novel by Wulf Sachs; Black Hamlet: The play by John Bright and Wulf Sachs
- Title: African tragedy: A novel
Writer: Wulf Sachs (edited and introduced by Laurence Wright)
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1036418618 - Title: Black Hamlet: The play
Writers: John Bright and Wulf Sachs (edited and introduced by Laurence Wright)
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1036418812
Two new books add to the published oeuvre of South Africa’s pioneering psychoanalyst, Wulf Sachs.
The first book, my edition of African tragedy, had a long gestation. I was at a conference in Cape Town in 1996. I know it was 1996 because that was the year in which the Johns Hopkins/Wits UP re-issue of Black Hamlet by Wulf Sachs appeared. I had heard of the book – who wouldn’t be intrigued by the sexy title? But I had never come across it. I bought a copy at the Wits UP stand and read it with fascination.
Wulf Sachs was a Lithuanian Jew who, with his family, like many others, fled persecution in Czarist Russia, arriving in South Africa in 1922. He was well educated, being both a qualified medical doctor and a practising psychoanalyst, with qualifications from the Psychoneurological Institute in Saint Petersburg, where he had studied under Pavlov and Bechterev; from the University of Cologne, where he had obtained his MD degree; and from the University of London, where he had graduated as a medical doctor. A member of the British and the International Psychoanalytical Societies, in 1935 he founded and became president of a nascent South African Psychoanalytical Society, striving to establish Freudian psychoanalysis in the country on an institutional basis. The society was formally established only in 1949, the year of Sachs’s death.
Sachs settled in Doornfontein not far from a grim urban slum known as Rooiyard, occupied largely by rural migrants and soon to be demolished to allow for urban expansion, part of an attempt to purge the area of black people as the nascent apartheid agenda gained momentum. Prior to its demise, the yard’s social anthropology was being investigated by a young social anthropologist, Ellen Hellman, for her master’s dissertation. In due course, she introduced Sachs to a resident Manyikan nganga called John Chawafambira, whose life story Sachs elected to write, and which was eventually published in 1937 as the book Black Hamlet.
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Sachs was out to demonstrate two things. First, that black urban migrants were in a terrible plight, not of their making, and one with which they were lamentably ill-equipped to cope. And, secondly, that the exciting new thought package of Freudianism successfully straddled the apparent crevasse between Western modernity and African traditionalism.
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Sachs was out to demonstrate two things. First, that black urban migrants were in a terrible plight, not of their making, and one with which they were lamentably ill-equipped to cope. And, secondly, that the exciting new thought package of Freudianism successfully straddled the apparent crevasse between Western modernity and African traditionalism. Internationally, Freud had become the intellectual depth charge of the times, and Sachs became his leading South African exponent. Freudianism apparently offered a key to understanding universal human nature, something Sachs set out to demonstrate for South Africa and, by implication, for Africa and the world, through capturing Chawafambira’s story, that of a Manyikan nganga struggling to survive in the urban maelstrom of the industrialising Johannesburg of the 1930s. No small ambition.
Two issues stood out as I read the book. First, despite rich and detailed introductions by Saul Dubow and Jacqueline Rose, the volume was a straight reprint of the first edition published in London by Geoffrey Bles. No annotations, just the original text. Yet here was a book thick with local references and the history and ambience of 1930s Johannesburg – not the idealised city of the Randlords and mining magnates, nor that of the thrusting white middle classes, but that of rural migrants drawn to the “Big Smoke” by the lure of employment, and becoming trapped in places like Doornfontein’s Rooiyard. Wulf Sachs, unusually for the times, was a white person deeply interested in their plight, who cared enough to want to bring it to the attention of South Africa and the world. Undoubtedly, the book deserved to be much better known.
Secondly, as I read, a passing comment by Dubow snagged my attention. He mentioned that Sachs had originally set out to write the story in the form of a novel, “and indeed, a manuscript entitled ‘African tragedy: The life of a native doctor’ does exist”. This was blood in the air to a peckish hyena. At the time, I was busy with other projects – adult literacy, industrial education, teacher development – but the memory lingered. Eventually, I got in touch with the Wits archive and asked to read the manuscript. This was before the era of systemic digitisation, but the archivists obliged and sent me a scan. I brooded on the text for some years.
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The text demands brooding, because while the published version packages itself as an essay in psychobiography, recording what Sachs learned of Chawafambira directly and indirectly in the process of lengthy psychoanalysis, this unpublished text was clearly a novel, incorporating episodes which could not possibly have emerged in psychoanalytical sessions.
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The text demands brooding, because while the published version packages itself as an essay in psychobiography, recording what Sachs learned of Chawafambira directly and indirectly in the process of lengthy psychoanalysis, this unpublished text was clearly a novel, incorporating episodes which could not possibly have emerged in psychoanalytical sessions. Indeed, I pursued the matter only to find that much of the material which had gone into the novel had been gleaned from NADA, the anthropological journal of the Southern Rhodesian Native Affairs Department. Unmistakably so.
Much of Sachs scholarship mentions the unpublished manuscript African tragedy in passing, usually dismissing it as an unimportant ur version of Black Hamlet. Only two articles make any detailed use of it: an excellent piece by Adam Sitze, who looks at the story’s psychology from a legal perspective, and another by Lötte Koßler. The rest is silence. Even more peculiar is that even among those who mention the manuscript, no one appears to have noticed that a significant chunk is missing. And that missing passage is, I believe, a clue to what happened to Sachs’s novel.
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Given that Sachs’s novel transgresses anthropological proprieties in all sorts of ways, it seems to me highly probable that the anthropologists counselled against publication, hinting that Sachs should instead depend on his acknowledged Freudian expertise.
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The missing passage concerns an episode where John Chawafambira saves the young anthropologist (Ellen Hellman) from possible molestation during a booze-fuelled binge one Saturday evening in Rooiyard. Now, the manuscript of African tragedy was bought by Wits from the posthumous papers of Professor Alfred Hoernlé, a prominent academic philosopher and husband of the well-known anthropologist Winifred Hoernlé, who led an enterprising group of young Wits anthropology students, to whom Sachs had in fact read extracts from his work in progress. I believe – and I’m only guessing – that the missing chunk of text was sent by one of the Hoernlés to Ellen Hellman for her scrutiny, because it concerned her personally, and it was never returned. Given that Sachs’s novel transgresses anthropological proprieties in all sorts of ways, it seems to me highly probable that the anthropologists counselled against publication, hinting that Sachs should instead depend on his acknowledged Freudian expertise. This suggests why the novel’s manuscript remained abandoned in the custody of Alfred Hoernlé, and may also explain the swerve to a form of faux psychoanalytical biography, which is what emerges in the revision called Black Hamlet.
Wulf Sachs had no idea that the manuscript of African tragedy would survive. He could safely assume that everything there was to know about John Chawafambira was expressed in the two books he had published. But the novel African tragedy is the story Sachs really wanted to tell, before sage counsel induced the text’s transformation into Black Hamlet (1937) and, ten years later, Black anger (1947). Ponder African tragedy in detail, and those two earlier books can never be understood as once they were. Sachs scholarship will need revision.
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The second book is a real surprise. One evening, I was badgering the googlesphere, hoping to find more material on Wulf Sachs. It had always puzzled me that one of the liveliest minds of the ’30s had left so little behind.
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The second book is a real surprise. One evening, I was badgering the googlesphere, hoping to find more material on Wulf Sachs. It had always puzzled me that one of the liveliest minds of the ’30s had left so little behind. Of course, patients’ notes would be destroyed, but why no lectures, draft articles, sketches for African tragedy, working papers – anything? Nothing had made it into the archive. Between 70 and 80 pages into the search, in a complete dwaal, I was arrested by an entry in the tiniest of fonts: “Black Hamlet, a play in three acts. Based on a work by Wulf Sachs. © John Bright, Wulf Sachs ….” The script had been deposited in the Library of Congress in 1949, and had never been looked at.
Here was the story of John Chawafambira, dramatised for Broadway by the tough Hollywood scriptwriter John Bright, best known for gangster movies from the 1930s which made James Cagney famous – pioneering films like Public enemy, Smart money and Blonde crazy (all 1931). My sleuthing has patched together the extraordinary story of how this archetypally South African material was primed to join the American Civil Rights Movement but never made it to the boards. Briefly, the script was copyrighted in 1949, Wulf Sachs died very unexpectedly in Johannesburg later that same year, and John Bright did a bunk to Mexico to avoid attention from HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, for his left-wing sympathies. A production in those circumstances was a non-starter.
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I won’t recap the story, but the play climaxes in its penultimate scene with a wildly hallucinatory court scene in which South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission plays out long years before the real event actually happened.
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The script the two left behind is a striking contribution to the Black Atlantic dialogue. There are obvious signs that Bright had never set foot in Africa, but all in all, this is a highly competent piece of theatre, remarkable in its outright excoriation of apartheid even before the scourge had formally taken root. I won’t recap the story, but the play climaxes in its penultimate scene with a wildly hallucinatory court scene in which South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission plays out long years before the real event actually happened. I hope some enterprising South African director will at last nurture the long-lost playscript into life.
- Laurence Wright is an extraordinary professor at North-West University. He was formerly HA Molteno Professor of English and director of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University. He has published on writers such as Sol Plaatje, VS Naipaul, Edgar Allen Poe, JM Coetzee, Tom Sharpe, Shakespeare, RL Peteni, Somerset Maugham and Guy Butler. He has also written on the future of the humanities in South Africa, on South African language policy and on the Eastern Cape education crisis.
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Athol Fugard and the Serpent Players: The Port Elizabeth years
PenAfrican: The equality of shadows by Charl-Pierre Naudé – a book review
Migrant literature themes in Die wêreld van Charlie Oeng by Etienne van Heerden