Njabulo Ndebele's Fools and Rediscovery of the Ordinary

Njabulo Ndebele's name has been surrounded by controversy on two recent occasions: First he clashed with Mewa Ramgobin of the ANC's Department of Arts and Culture on Agenda. As the chairperson of the National Arts Initiative, he defended the right of artists to free expression regardless of their political affiliation against the ANC's claim to represent all artists adequately. The second controversy arose when FW de Klerk vetoed the independent jurists' first choice of Ndebele as the chairperson of the SABC Board. The reason de Klerk gave for his decision was that Ndebele did not speak Afrikaans! The irony that he himself did not speak any of the indiginous South African languages, while Ndebele speaks several, apparently eluded de Klerk.

The choice of Ndebele as chairperson of the Arts Initiative and the SABC indicates both the stature and independence of this acclaimed writer and academic. Ndbele has a string of degrees from Cambridge and Denver, as well as awards to his name - the Noma Award for Fools and the Thomas Pringle award for a literary essay, which make him a prime candidate for top academic and cultural positions in the current transition to a fully democratic society. His CV bears this out: He was a lecturer and vice-rector at Roma University in Lesotho, followed by a brief stint as head of the African Languages Department at WITS, after which he became the vice-rector of the University of the Western Cape and - most recently - the rector of Turfloop. Ndebele's most outstanding feature is his intellectual and political independence, which he guards with a calm conviction that may rile loyal party supporters on both sides of the political divide. Although he actively participated in the liberation struggle, he is all too aware of the dangers that might arise when the liberation movement becomes the ruling party. One way to counter this is to establish independent civic structures such as the National Arts Initiative.

Ndebele's critical and literary writing turns away from the concerns of the struggle literature that dominated the eighties. In Rediscovery, which could be seen as the theoretical foundation of Fools and other stories, Ndebele explains why the portrayal of the oppressed felt inadequate: „Gradually, over a period of historical time, an image emerged and consolidated, [...] of people completely destroyed, of passive people whose only reason for existing seemed to be to receive the sympathy of the world." (R 158) In his writing, Ndebele wants to break away from the stereotype of the passive victim, which he sees as life-negating. He turns to the ordinary lives of people that inspired pre-eighties writers, such as Es'kia Mphalele, Richard Rive, Bessie Head, Can Themba, Nat Nakasa etc. By shifting his attention from the spectacular victories and defeats of the oppressed to their daily fight for survival, he reveals the resourcefulness, laughter and spirit, the active and life-affirming qualities at the heart of resistance.

The ability to define one's own interests is central to Ndebele's idea of resistance. He describes „the depriving of the oppressed of any meaningful, significant intellectual life" as „one of the most debilitating effects of oppression" .(R 158) )Mandla, the artist in the story Uncle, gave form to this feeling of emptiness in his sculpture of a hunchback. He comments: „The man was groaning, not under the weight of useless flesh on his back, but under the drum of human skin, filled with air. I could not stand it. That's what we all are when we have given everything away to the white man's cities. We groan so pathetically under the emptiness of our minds. And there is nothing so grotesquely tragic as an empty tin that has only a small grain of sand in it. It rings all the more horribly." (F 79f.) In this story, Ndebele pays tribute to the artist's ability to define the quality of oppression and to express the desire for a different life.

Art becomes a symbolic gesture of reclaiming one's land. When helping his nephew with his geography homework, the uncle advises him to draw his own map of South Africa. He tells him to add a new place to the map when he has thought of something to give it. The map traces the boy's journey from birth. The uncle explains: „Show me Bloemfontein … yes … That is where your grandmother and grandfather are. Your uncles. Your younger mothers. They are all there. That is the centre of your life too. Your mother had to come home before you were born because you were her first born. And that is where I buried your umbilical chord. Right there in the yard. Wherever you are in the world, you must return to that yard. Now show me Johannesburg … yes … That is where Uncle bought his trumpet. Now look at this: Ladysmith, Pietermaritzburg, Durban, East London, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, Kimberley, Pietersburg, Middelburg, Witbank, Pretoria, Springs, Germiston. All foreign names; but that will change in time. This whole land, mshana, I have seen it all. And I have given it music. You too must know this land. The whole of it, and find out what you can give it. So you must make a big map of the country, your own map. Put it on the wall. Each time you hear of a new place, put it on the map. Soon you will have a map full of places. And they will be your places. And it will be your own country. And then you must ask yourself: what can I give to all those places? And when you have found the answer, you will know why you want to visit those places." (F 66) There is a special relationship between the mother's brother and her son in African society. The uncle treats his nephew both with generosity and as an equal. This also holds true for Ndebele's portrayal of children: tender, yet never sentimental or melodramatic. He shows the weaknesses and vanities of his characters as well as their strengths.

Ndebele, however, does not force symbolic moments such as the drawing of the map. They simply flow into the story. The perspective is often that of a child (the only exception being the title story Fools), but events are narrated from the outside. This allows for distance as well as closeness: Although the narrator has outgrown his childhood views and feelings, he has sufficient empathy to recreate them. Ndebele focuses on the formative experiences of childhood: The child-heroes grow by facing the „outside" world. Simangele, the farm-boy, proves himself to the township-boys by taking up Vusi's challenge to be „a horse in the rain" .Thoba, the onlooker, suddenly joins them. The athmosphere of the muddy streets and the body's pleasure in its own strength is sensuously evoked: „There was something freeing in the tickling pressure of the soft needles of rain on his skin. And then he ran in spurts: running fast and slowing down, playing with the pressure of the rain on him. It was a pleasant sensation; a soft pattering sensation. And the rain purred so delicately against his ears. And when he waded in and out of the puddles, savouring the recklessness, it was so enchanting to split the water, creating his own little thunder from the numerous splashes. He was alone in the street with the rain. He was shirtless in the rain." (F 21) He is not doing this for himself only, but also for an invisible audience: „How many people were watching him from the protective safety of their houses? How many? They were sitting round their kitchen stoves, taking no challenges. Mpiyakhe? Was he watching him? Of course. Mpiyakhe, the vanquished. Everybody would know. Vusi and Simangele would know that he, Thoba, had bravely followed them into the cold rain." (F 21) In passages like these, Ndebele reveals his fine eye for the drama of growing up as a boy. The race in the rain is a test of manhood, of the boy's mastery over his own body and fears. The imagined eyes of the grown-ups and the big boys give the necessary approval for Thoba's quest.

The foundations for emotional and intellectual growth are laid at an early stage in childhood in the bond between parents and children. It is the time when we still feel at one with the world, protected at the same time as open to its wonders. We see things freshly, for the first time, not yet clouded by preconceptions that form when we learn to speak. The pain of the real only comes later with an awareness of the social laws, accounting perhaps for the absence or loss of a parent or extreme poverty. Although Ndebele is aware of the trauma caused by apartheid, he does not let it crush the fragile individuality of his child-characters. Instead he reinforces the innocence and wonder of childhood in order to establish a common humanity. Ndebele is all too aware that this bond has been cut by the social and economic deprivation caused by apartheid laws (e.g. the homeland policy and migrant labour). He speaks of the resulting trauma and the need to establish a basic humanity for the whole of society. Whites, who have become indifferent to the feelings and aspirations of blacks, need to overcome apartheid in their heads and discover the humanity of the other. Ndebele notes: „We need to give ourselves time to reclaim our humanity. Precisely because we have been such a traumatised society, where the humanity of society as a whole was relegated in preference for a purely ideological goal, we still have to develop a humanistic tradition." (The Weekly Mail - Guardian, 13.8.93)

Yet childhood is not simply an innocent state we can return to. It has to be re-invented and nurtured so that we may transcend the barriers of apartheid society. It is the strength of Ndebele's stories that he does not exclude the incongruous - which is the mark of the real - from his depiction of township life. The characters of his stories live in Charterston, a township near Nigel, a place Ndebele knows intimately from his own childhood. They come from a lower middle class to middle class background, the majority being professionals such as teachers, priests, artists and officials in the township administration.

Women play an important role of in these stories of everyday life. Often they are the sole bread-winners and rearers of children, e.g. the mother in Prophetess and Uncle. Yet it is the uncle who introduces his nephew to the wonders of the soul on surprise visits, while his mother sees to his more mundane needs. The power of the prophetess to heal and to foretell the future by invoking the spirits of the ancestors instils fear and respect in the boy fetching healing water for his mother. She seems to represent the authority of tradition. The women in Fools enable the men to bridge the generation gap in the struggle for liberation by forcing them to re-evaluate their relationships with women. In spite of this tribute to the strength of women, all central characters in the stories are boys or men. Men seem destined to become the fighters and artists, while women on the whole play a supporting role.

This is an area which some women are continuing to explore in their stories of the ordinary, just as other writers are discovering class difference in the experience of the ordinary. The concept of the ordinary covers a wide range of experiences, which are still begging to be told. It is Ndebele's achievement that he has pointed writers to this rich source of inspiration with his stories of the ordinary that are never dull.