INVASION OF JORDAN?
Mainz, Germany American Army and Air Force unitsas well as military units within the U.S. -worked feverishly in preparation for possible intervention in Jordan during the conflict between Palestine commandoes and the royal government.
On July 11, United States military forces were placed on "Red Alert"-a code to indicate the highest degree of combat preparedness short of war itself. Within hours, thousands of soldiers began loading Howitzer ammunition; airborne units undergoing summer trainina avarcicae waro rocallad from the possible invasion if it seemed likely the commandoes were in a position to take power in Jordan.
The crisis dissipated in the accord reached between the royal government and the Palestine forces and the alert was called off. U.S. troops remain ready to move if the situation again merits a "Red Alert." Stockpiles of ammunition and tons of equipment have been loaded on air transports and rigged for parachuting. Units of airborne infantry and artillery remain ready in the event orders are given.
Contingency plans call for a quick airdrop into Jordan with Americans infontey unite icolating and suppressing guerrilla bases in a coordinated movement. American artillery units would provide fire-power and would position themselves along Jordan's borders in the event that other Arab nations attempted to intervene.
From a military and political perspective, these contingency plans provide a special appeal to the Nixon administration. Intervention in Jordan would enable the United States to prop up a "moderate" government and the elimination of guerrillas would relieve pressure against both Jordan and the exposed Israeli border.
A vivid portrayal of social relations in a novel, play or short story can throw light on the nature of the society in which the characters live and move, struggle and die. What we ask of a writer is that his picture of life should be rue. But what is true? One man's truth is to another man a lie. Much of South African literature holds up a distorting mirror to society. Truth and falsehood are so mixed that we are in danger of drawing false conclusions from what we read. Then it is necessary for us to confront the superficial or false picture with the social reality.
The Racist Lie Racialism, the racist lie of white superiority and black inferiority, falis like a blight on the whole of South African society, affecting every sphere, political, social or economic, and dictating all he perversions and violences of racial segregation, or apartheid, to give it the new name that echoes round the world with resounding notoriety for the reigning Nationalist Government. What we have to remember is that this social sickness was not initiated by the present Ainkaner vacionansts, It nas arways been the handmaid of colonial and imperialist conquest throughout the world. Since the Lie permeates the whole of South African society, t must of necessity be reflected in its literature and has done so in different forms throughout the twentieth century, as the thin stream of writing, confined at first understandably to the privileged whites, has swelled from the mid-century mark to quite a tide. The writer is not an isolated entity spinning his art in the cocoon of his individual soul. We must ask: what exactly is this individual soul? Like any other individual, he is moulded from birth by the social mores of his society, by its dominating ideas, by education in many forms.
He can be enriched by the sum total of its influences, or warped and starved by them.
Where the racist lie is accepted by the majority footed in intelectual dihonesse, os atten rooted in intellectual dist esty, or at least Bolding Te eltor tp te serite, ts r, far from olding the mimor up! aedly protesting against the social injustice that is part A apo creie doved County ae the OCOCE NTINIn But pity is a tattered arment fit only for the rag-heap. Even when it was first published (1948) it was not true to the spirit of its time. The writer attempts to convey sweetness and light in the novel's picture of the humble Zulu parson going in search of his son in Johannesburg, where his peoplé live in sin and suffering, and, when his son is hanged for murdering a welfare worker, son of a white farmer, the latter, as it were, turns the other cheek and is full of loving kindness to the black parson. But such a picture, while true in its instances of violence. is false at the very time Vorid Nar, fereshe surgest af new histerical ressed Blacks.
World War, epoch and were demanding equality with a militancy that was spreading throughout Asia nd Africa. To preach at such a time that "lov S WEdLEr Cuan TOTd S TO COLIe I OlO familiar treachery in the trappings of a defunct Unele Tom figure. The false simplicity of the style of the novelonly to underline an artistic failure where no single character comes to life. And compassion cannot effect real communication across the colour-line. It seems to be prompted by the uneasy awareness of an advancing black tide. Hence the appeal to conscience.
The White Problem What is called the Colour problem is not simply a fact of South African life. It is an obsession, SWAPO VICE-PRESIDENT AND NINE OTHERS ON TRIAL SWAPO has just unearthed a secret trial which is under way in Pretoria in South Africa. The ten men on trial are all members of SWAPO, charged under the Terrorism Act. Five of them ire charged for activities allegedly performed ir 1964-66, several years before the Terrorism Aci had been enacted. This has been made possible because the Terrorism Act of 1967 was made retrospective to 1962. Three of the accused are charged for activities in 1968 while for two men the charges are not yet known.
The ten men are, in the order in which they appear on the list we have got: Alexander Simon, Just Mbala Siloka, Manowa Mulibe Mahunga Mzilikazi, Masia Ingenda, Isiah Muhapulo Sitimela, Wilkenson Muluti Lukongo, Alfred Seloiso, Bernard Matmola Malapo. Charlie Simpatie and Brendan Kangongola society and literature à national neurosis. But the term Colour problem is itself inaccurate. It is not the black man who is the problem. To the black man himself it is the white man who is the problem, with his racial myths and obsessions, the sheer barbarity of his master-race mentality. In South African literature the relationship between white and black inevitably looms large. It is more correct to speak of alienation, of a paralysis of communication and a dehumanisaion of the whites more than the blacks. Their very unawareness of the blacks as human beings is an aspect of racial fear. In Dan Jacobson's collection of short stories, A Long Way from London, he demonstrates in one of them with relentlessly accuracy how this dehumanisation operates. The story has the ironic title of "A Day In The Country". A Jewish family driving along a country road come across a group of whites-Afrikanersroaring with laughter as they place a terror stricken African child in and out of the bonnet it. Only when they were pursued and insulted by the young Afrikaners did a near fight take place. But the point of the story is not the racial tensions between Jew. and Afrikaner; it is a more subtle one of the sense of a common guilt and fear more than hate.
Master-Racists....
Confining ourselves here to the English-speaking section, we can say that present-day writers have developed beyond the crude handling of the Colour theme characteristic of Sarah Gertrude Millin's novels in the twenties. in God's Stepchildren, for instance, where the very title bespeaks the master-race mentality.
The curious thing is that she saw herself as a realist eminently equipped to depiet the depravity and squalor of existence on the imberley diamond diggings where she liver '1 want to write about E ES SE I said. And with quick, spare brush-strokes she painte the polome scenes where wore men scrabble fors slaves toil Be oftal of European ardised, degenerate She to the segregated junk.
ps of paratiin tit and sacking where the fricans are "housed". "On the fringe of th diggings, their shameful hovels breaking out on the face of the hills like the disease from which most of them suffer, live the kaffirs. They are the most degraded of Africans They are the corruption or civtlisation. That master of the naturalist style, Emile Zola, might almost have Been to her study of a Coloared family theo uge several generations, namely in God's Stepchildren, we find the picture of their tribulations is false at the core. There is a spiritual blockage, a failure of vision because it is tainted with racialism. She reflects the white nan s obsession win wnat is caled race-punti he does not, as in Alan Paton's novel, Too Late The Phalarope, make the teller of the tale the aunt of the policeman-hero, hag-ridden by the shame to the whole Afrikaner family when her perfect nephew is impaled on the Immorality Act, discovered as guilty of breaking "the soliest law" by having intercourse with a Coloured woman.
When Sarah Gertrude Millin holds the mirror up to society she seems to see in the Coloured man a kind of monkey. The artistic flaw in God's Stepchildren is rooted in a moral flaw. She describes Barry, a good, respectable man, with every appearance of being a white man, as decendod seyem genetin Bae on ot te lescended several generations back fron raman, a thing like a beasa, degra red tottentot voman, a thing like a beast alse heroics when she makes him expiate his "sin —that is, of living as a white man b "sacrificing' himself and going to serve his own people. She offends good art because she offends even common sense. What she puts into with "participation in terroristic activities" in Caprivi; Alexander Simon has been charged for activities in Okavango in November-December 1968.
Brendan Kangongola Simbwaye is the Vice-President of SWAPO. He was originally served with a detention order on 24th September 1964 by Michael Daniel Christian de Wet Nel, then Minister of Bantu Administration and Development of South Africa. Mr. Simbwaye was moved from East Caprivi Zipfel to Ohopoho in Kaokoveld where he stayed for some time. Later he was moved to Warmbad in the southern part of Namibia. Here his health was weakened, according to information received by his wife. Since last year nothing has been heard about him until now when he is being held in Pretoria with the other SWAPO men held for trial.
This trial is the third in a row of trials of Noilon foodam Haltar fiction is confirmed by a passage in her book, The South Africans, where she bluntly states:
'The will to succeed is not in him-the Coloured man... Although he vociferates that his heart is as white as the white man's, that he does not consider himself anyone's inferior, his attitude is a mere pathetic bluff. It is this very heart he speaks of, the spirit within him, which is not white. It is as if the darkness of his skin descends also on his soul... And how could it be otherwise? Consider his ancestry. In his veins runs, on tae one side, te blood or slaves, on the other side, the blood of the careless, the selfish, the stupid, the vicious.
The master-race mentality is in truth a moral sickness.
.and Liberals Now let us turn for a moment to what Alan Paton does with the Colour theme about thirty eao laur roo cute ne aaarone Hs 1 Cry the Beloved Country, he saturates his study of a white man's spiritual torment with pity, and again, pity is not enough for the creation of living, convincing characters. Every one is a shadow, most of all, of course, the Coloured woman, otepnamie, wno is the obiect or the tragic hero's temptation and the cause of his destruction, together with that of his whole family. Pieter van Vlaanderen is endowed-as every tragic hero must be-with all the virtues; he is handsome, a fine policeman, a magnificent rugby player. Even to the black people in the • location (ghetto) he was "like a god" , He inspires in everybody admiration and respect so that his fall must be that of'a tragic hero, from a great height to the lowest depths. Bul here's the rub. What is the height and what i the depth? One has the impression that Paton flogs his theme of a white man's sin and suffering. "I was tempted by what I hated to seize something that could bring no joy contesses Pieter , and flagellates himself as a creature of foul desires and iniquities, but at the same time most unheroically praying to his god not to be discovered in his sin. All will be well it only the sergeant who envies him does not rove to be a peeping Tom. He is the villain.
. Mr. Pator all your efforts cannot turn this to a tragic theme. Though you seem to tr rery ard, your tragie hero falls blindfold fror he height of a stas te-cliff no further than to the dusty stage-floor. What is meant to be tragic becomes grotesque.
The author ascribes the following thoughts to the doomed white policeman: "Then she (the oouca lemo essnuee a me ane toe ma ickness that I hate and fear came over me, an she knew it, being one of the things she understands.. I should have said to her: this is not my work (to help her to keep her child). I should have said to her: let them take your child and send you to prison, let them throw you into the street, let them hang you by the neck until you are dead, but do not come to my home, nor smile at me, nor think there can be anything between you and me. For this law is the greatest and holiest of all the laws, and if you break it and are discovered, for you it is nothing but another breaking of the law. But if I break it and am discovered, the whole world will be broken.
The real meaning of the story thus becomes, not the pitiful conflict in a white man, but the alienation, the spiritual destruction brought about by a racist society. One regrets that the author did not have the artistic skill to devise a means to broaden the perspective of the tragedy so that he is seen to be aware also of the inhuman indifference of the white man and woman to the existence of the black. Perhaps an Afrikaner himself would reject this study of self-torment as the offensive pity of an English liberal.
Outraged Reason-A New Militancy Nadine Gordimer, the subtlest and most artistically mature of our South African writers, explores in her novels and some of her short stories, with a keen intelligence and all her alert senses, the fundamental sickness in South African society. She becomes aware of it as and the verdict given on 22nd August. The difference between this trial and the previous ones is that this is held in total secrecy. It is obvious that the South African Government wants to avoid the world-wide publicity and condemnation of the two previous ones at a time when it is trying to contain its open and strong internal conflicts. (In this connection it is worth mentioning that the documents seized from the main South African Sunday newspapers by the police on 21st February contained detailed information about the recent SWAPO guerrilla activities in the northern part of Namibia.)
SWAPO strongly condemns this trial and appeals to Governments, organisations and all men of good will to help making this trial known, and to condemn it as yet another illegal act by South Africa-an atrocity against the people of Namibia and an open and defiant atine ofthaiefth alienation, the paralysis of communication bet ween individuals of different races, the sense of estrangement commonly felt in modern capitalist society everywhere but intensified a hundredfold in the conditions of racism. She does not write from a deliberate moral purpose; she is entirelv free from sentimentalitv and she abhors the futility of pity. It is her reason that is outraged, not her conscience. She wanted first and foremost to live a private life as a fully cultured individual, which implies also the satisfaction of human relationship, and above all the sense of integrity in relationship. She is not haunted by any racial myth nor is,she tempted to be (as one of her characters expresses it) "a voyeur of social ills and social perversions She is also too artistically honest to delve into the imagined feelings of the blacks because she "knows them. She doesn't. And it her non-white characters are not etched with that brilliance of concrete imagery that is one of her chief artistie gifts, it is because she is acutely aware that she is up against this basic fact of alienation in such a society. Even the violent death of a man(she makes one of her characters say) comes at her, as it were, only tarougn glass Her sensitive writing demands exploring in depth. Here we would mention only one of her later novels: Occasion for Loving. The choice of the situation itself is a challenge to race hysteria, the pre-ocupation with race purity, the selftorments of sin or the dread of legal taboos. Nevertheless the problem of colour invades what to the onlooker in the story should be seen as a normal, private love-affair between a young woman, the idle wife of a pre-occupied musicologist, and a cultured African. Indeed the two young characters are lightly etehed in. The core of the theme is the way their love-affair opens a vein of experience in the sensitive. cultured woman through whom the story is told. She is disturbed because she realises that Chis essentially ay and thoughtless loving, thi ud of relationship can only wither in th climate of racism. She fears especially that the surrounding conditions and prevailing attitudes must corrupt the integrity of any such private relationship. Conflict there must be between three such people: the husband, the wife and the lover, but even this pattern of human conflict takes a jagged course in a racial setting. There is no escape on the part of the writer into the obviously melodramatic, no violence, no salacious scandal, no police terror, no public trial, which are the common ingredients to be found both in fact and fiction. Nevertheless the ssault on privacy, the sense of the corruptio t numan feeling, the alienation betwee individuals permeates the whole texture of the writing.
Nadine Gordimer is not at liberty to roam the turbulent ocean of South African society where its white, black, Coloured and Indian denizens are locked in a racial conflict in the name of the unholy creed of apartheid. She belongs to a small intellectual stratum of a white protected minority. Nevertheless the ever-restless antennae of her perceptions and her searching intelligence enable her to probe the moral sickness pervading South African society and convey it in many subtle ways. At the same time, her inviolable artistic integrity ensures the accuracy of the image she presents to us. The mirror may be small but it does not make the mistake of distorting the truth.
The volume of South African writing grows steadily. At tirst white writers, especially English-speaking, dominated the literary scene. We have touched on only a few. Legalised cultural starvation ensured that there were few Black writers, but with the growth of a new militancy, they, too, have been making their voices heard. And it is not a humble voice, nor does it ask for pity.
Dora Taylor INTERNATIONAL-JUST OUT!
International is the bi-monthly theoretical journal of the International Marxist Group, the British Section of the Fourth excellent article on the need for an International and the role being played by the Fourth International.
There are also extracts from James Connolly on Ireland and the IMG's views on the political situation in Britain after the Labour defeat, youth radicalisation, Ireland, etc.
3/- per issue. Write to C. Harris, 182 Pentonville Road, London N.1.
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International. It now appears in a new format and the first issue includes an