• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Was he then hostile to the liberation struggle?

Was he hostile? No, he was not hostile. Hostile, sympathetic – as a biographer you above all ought to be wary of putting people in neat little boxes with labels on them.

I hope I am not putting Coetzee in a box.

Well, that is how it sounds to me. No, he was not hostile to the liberation struggle. If you are a fatalist, as he tended to be, there is no point in being hostile to the course that history takes, however much you may regret it. To the fatalist, history is fate.

Very well, did he then regret the liberation struggle? Did he regret the form the liberation struggle took?

He accepted that the liberation struggle was just. The struggle was just, but the new South Africa towards which it strove was not Utopian enough for him.

What would have been Utopian enough for him?

The closing down of the mines. The ploughing under of the vineyards. The disbanding of the armed forces. The abolition of the automobile. Universal vegetarianism. Poetry in the streets. That sort of thing.

In other words, poetry and the horse-drawn cart and vegetarianism are worth fighting for, but not liberation from apartheid?

Nothing is worth fighting for. You compel me into the role of defending his position, a position I do not happen to share. Nothing is worth fighting for because fighting only prolongs the cycle of aggression and retaliation. I merely repeat what Coetzee says loud and clear in his writings, which you say you have read.

Was he at ease with his black students – with black people in general?

Was he at ease with anyone? He was not an at-ease person (can you say that in English?). He never relaxed. I witnessed that with my own eyes. So: Was he at ease with black people? No. He was not at ease among people who were at ease. The ease of others made him ill at ease. Which sent him off – in my opinion – in the wrong direction.

What do you mean?

He saw Africa through a romantic haze. He thought of Africans as embodied, in a way that had been lost long ago in Europe. What do I mean? Let me try to explain. In Africa, he used to say, body and soul were indistinguishable, the body was the soul. He had a whole philosophy of the body, of music and dance, which I can’t reproduce, but which seemed to me, even then – how shall I say? – unhelpful. Politically unhelpful.

Please continue.

His philosophy ascribed to Africans the role of guardians of the truer, deeper, more primitive being of humankind. He and I argued quite strenuously about this. What his position boiled down to, I said, was old-fashioned Romantic primitivism. In the context of the 1970s, of the liberation struggle and the apartheid state, it was unhelpful to look at Africans in his way. And anyway, it was a role they were no longer prepared to fulfil.

Was this the reason why black students avoided his course, your joint course, in African literature?

It was a viewpoint that he did not openly propagate. He was always very careful in that respect, very correct. But if you listened carefully it must have come across.

There was one further circumstance, one further bias to his thinking, that I must mention. Like many whites, he regarded the Cape, the western Cape and perhaps the northern Cape along with it, as standing apart from the rest of South Africa. The Cape was a country of its own, with its own geography, its own history, its own languages and culture. In this mythical Cape, haunted by the ghosts of what we used to call the Hottentots, the Coloured people were rooted, and to a lesser extent the Afrikaners too, but black Africans were aliens, latecomers, outsiders, as were the English.

Why do I mention this? Because it suggests how he could justify the rather abstract, rather anthropological attitude he took up towards black South Africa. He had no feeling for black South Africans. That was my private conclusion. They might be his fellow citizens but they were not his countrymen. History – or fate, which was to him the same thing – might have cast them