3 / like them; but not the two he hoped to find.'

The wistfulness of this conclusion stems largely from the fact that the white child has lost two potential friends. Significantly, Michael is described as a lonely child without brothers and sisters, with few friends at school. During the day his parents work and this solitary boy begins to form the basis of a relationship with the black children. However, 'Beggar my Neighbour' turns out to be a story of wasted opportunities. The work's implication that the gap between

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black and white people has grown too large for reconciliation is a theme common in works by white writers and Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country offers what is perhaps the most widely known exploration of it.

It is interesting to compare this story with a later piece by the black writer Mango Tshabangu entitled 'Thoughts in a Train' where two black children similarly walk the streets of a 'white'

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suburb. Jacobson's story never really describes the sensations of the two black children other than recording their furtiveness and the persistence of their visits. Tshabangu, however, notes that the overwhelming experience of his two young protagonists in such an area is one of fear; not so much a self-induced fear, but a response to the fear that surrounds them in these wealthy avenues.

'Another Day' operates in a similar way to 'Beggar my Neighbour'. The story successfully functions both realistically and in a fabular way. It describes how a young white boy follows the abject funeral procession of a black child through the streets of his town. The central encounter of the piece is that of the white boy and the young black man who pushes the barrow carrying the small coffin. This man, who is both undertaker and gravedigger, becomes a threatening figure in the boy's^ mind, suggesting that his fears of death and of black people are linked. At one point, for instance, we read:

"Don't run away," he [the black man] said. His hands grasped me gently. I was sure he would never let me go. Death itself stood over me, determined to punish my curiosity by satisfying it utterly. What had happened to

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that other child was going to happen to me. I was going to learn all that he had learned.

Nothing so dramatic happens, however; but, after the burial, the black man calls out to the white boy in 'a deep, mocking voice1:

OQ

'"Another time... Another day"'. All the way home the boy hears the rumbling of the black man's barrow behind him. The black man’s threat of some unspecified form of cataclysmic action is deferred to the future.

Peter Wilhelm's story 'Seth’n Sam1 similarly figures the clash between black and white people in terms of the relationship

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between two young people. In this case, Seth and Sam are black and white boys who have grown up together on the same farm. Although inseparable during their early years it is, as in many stories of colonial societies, when the white lad goes away for secondary schooling that the boys'' lives diverge and they grow apart from one another. It is a pattern observed, for Instance, in Cope’s ’Witch White’ and Hennie Aucamp’s Afrikaans Wimpie and Tatties stories.^ Wilhelm compresses the bildungs aspect of this story, swiftly bringing his two protagonists to early adulthood in a way similar to that of M.C. Botha's Afrikaans story 'Die Kort lewe van 'n gemiddelde man' (’The short life of an average man'), a work which is strikingly like 'Seth 'n Sam’ both in tone and subject. The young men meet while Sam (the white fellow) is on military service in the South African army. By now, Seth has joined a force of black guerillas and their final encounter is a fatal one as Seth shoots his white friend of earlier years.

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On a less sombre note than these stories is Christopher Hope's humorous parable of race relations in the country, 'The Problem

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with Staff. Instead of following the conventional pattern of prophetic stories about South Africa which variously end violently or with the black and white characters sundered from one another, Hope's work teasingly plays with the possibilities of what might happen if black and white South Africans cooperated with one another. The setting for this experiment in race relations is a hotel run by a white proprietor who employs three black waiters, each drawn significantly from one of the castes enshrined in the country's laws - black, Coloured, and Indian. As events turn out, Mr. Whitney ends up housing his black waiters and their families in the hotel, cheek-by-jowl with white guests and the result is a startling volte face for those who hold that such endeavours are doomed. Business booms, service improves, and the white hotelier gains more in the way of leisure than he had ever previously experienced when his black staff lived miles away from the hotel in dismal segregated slums. This story, however, is rare among works of prophecy and prediction about South Africa where by far the greatest number of works of this kind do not stress the benevolent possibilities arising out of racial harmony and do not deal with the situation humorously but consider in a sombre fashion the cruel consequences of people divided on the basis of differences in their skin colour.

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IV Responses to the Society (a) Sorrow and Rage

South African writers have dealt with the distressing conditions of their country either by weeping about them or by laughing at them. There are, however, works which collapse these two responses into one another by weeping and laughing at the same t i m e . ^ Although a crude kind of dichotomy, one can clearly discern two streams within South African fiction following one or other of these courses. In fiction by white writers in English the response of weeping at social conditions has been dominant, with the majority of works by leading writers such as Alan Paton, Jack Cope, Dan Jacobson, Nadine Gordimer, and J.M. Coetzee falling into this category. The humorous approach has been less copiously used with Herman Bosnian’s fiction remaining the high point of achievement in this regard. Bosman, indeed, often maintains a delicate balance between the two poles in works

f r which seem to both laugh and weep at the social conditions.'4 As we shall see, writers of the 1970’s and 1980’s such as Sheila Roberts, Peter Wilhelm, and especially Christopher Hope have found humour and humorous satire a particularly effective way of dealing with the cruel circumstances of their country. There is no doubt an incongruity where writers use forms of literary comedy to deal with aspects of social tragedy. Yet this need not imply a weakness in terms of this writing, nor suggest that the

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writer’s use of humour is a way^avoiding unpleasant social circumstances. The sense of disjunction and disturbance one gets on reading works which describe social hardships in a humorous way is an important vindication of the writer’s use of this

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literary mode. In the case of South African writers their use of forms of comedy can I think be understood on two levels. In the first place the absurdities and anomalies of apartheid offer a diversity of targets for a literary response of laughter; and this is often derisive. Secondly, by the 1970’s so many of the obvious tragedies and horrors of apartheid had been treated with sober concern in the literature that there was a sense of exhaustion of the subject. Humour and humorous satire proved ways in which writers could maintain concern about apartheid and yet bring diversity to this well-used subject.

One must also observe that within both these streams of writing, whether weeping or lauding, there is very often a common factor - that of anger. Behind the tears and behind the laughter writers often conspire to give vent to their anger and it is this aspect as much as the shared subject-matter which links the two streams in South African writing; it is a key element in works by black and white authors alike. The writers' protest can reside equally well in works of mirth as in those of sorrow,

I shall begin by considering the dominant approach of white writers in English. Circumstances in South Africa have lent themselves to a host of fictional works which dramatize the misery brought about by apartheid, where victims are most commonly black, but are occasionally white. Moreover, writers are often concerned to show how black and white people alike are affected by the system. We have noted the sense of sadness and loss in Paton’s 'A Drink in the Passage’ and Jacobson's 'Beggar

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my Neighbour1. This is also well treated in Jacobson’s TA Day in the Country' which describes an altercation between two white families over the way one family has abused a black child.^ A group of Afrikaners seize a black child who has ventured dangerously in front of their car and set about teaching the child a painful and humiliating lesson. A family of Jewish South Africans witness this incident and, after an angry exchange in their moving cars, square up to the Afrikaners expecting an almighty quarrel. Jacobson suggests in this encounter how both parties are especially sensitive about their racial identities and about the kind of slurs familiarly attached to each of their communities. This bracketing together of the racial consciousness of Jews and Afrikaners is virtually unique in South African fiction; and in choosing to focus on the clash of Jewish and Afrikaner people about the abuse of a black person, Jacobson adroitly achieves a composite view of the tensions and, ultimately, the failures which attend discrimination on the grounds of race. The Jewish family ' reprove the Afrikaners about their behaviour and easily take the upper hand in the dispute. However, the encounter and the incident with the black child brings little satisfaction to either side. The Jewish boy who is the story’s narrator remarks at the conclusion of the meeting with the Afrikaner family: ’No one shook hands with anyone, there had been no reconciliation to

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warrant that'. Moreover, in the final lines of the story, there is an overwhelming sense of loss and defeat at what has just taken place:

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, It was a quiet journey home. Everyone was feeling depressed and beaten, though as I have explained, the victory was ours. But we had all J-gst, so much, somewhere, farther back along that dusty road.

More common than stories of this type however, are those which describe the misery inflicted on black people. In such stories the writer’s sympathy rests squarely with the victims of white oppression. Alan Paton is the most adept white South African writer of this kind of fiction. Aside from his novels, his stories about black children at Diepkloof reformatory, his story 'Life for a Life’ about black rural workers, and his story ’Debbie go home’ about a family of mixed race, all strongly engage the reader’s sympathies for people who have been forced onto hard times. In ’Life for a Life’, for instance, there is the following sentence, representative of much of his work, which chronicles the cumulative load of injustice and indignity forced upon a black farm worker:

Because one was a shepherd, because one had no certitude of home or work or life or favour, because one’s back had to be bent though one’s soul would be upright, because one had to bear as a brand this dark sun-warmed colour of the skin, as good surely as any other, because of these things, this mad policeman could strike down, and hold by the neck, and call a creeping yellow Hottentot bastard, a man who had never hurt another in his long gentle life, a man who like the great Christ was a lover of sheep and of little children, and had been a good husband and father except for those occasional outbursts that any sensible woman will pass over, outbursts of the imprisoned manhood that has got tired of the chains that keep it down on its knees.

This long sentence whirls from the multitude of conditions and circumstances which damn a black man in South Africa, through qualities of his merit, to his rage and exhaustion at this debasing way of life. The repetition of the word ’because’ at

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the start of the opening phrases strikes dramatically like hammerblows. ’Life for a Life’ describes how a white community exacts vengeance on the black workers of a farm, after a white farmer has been murdered. A black man is chosen, the head shepherd on the farm, and killed. There is no question about 50 his innocence; yet a victim is needed and vengeance is taken. The story’s central concern is the ways in which white and black people express the hatred they feel for one another. After the white farmer's murder, for instance, the narrator describes the

sensations of the black shepherd and his wife in this way:

Guilt lay heavily upon them both, because they had hated Big Baas Flip [the murdered man], not with clenched fists and bared teeth, but, as befitted people in their station, with salutes and deference.

Similarly, after Enoch Maarman, the black shepherd, is killed, his brother-in-law Solomon Koopman responds to the news that the authorities are not going to investigate his death nor permit his body to be buried on the farm where he had served for nearly fifty years, in the following way: ’Solomon Koopman would have gone away, with a smile on his lips, and cold hate in his

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heart’. The white people, however, are under no compulsion to hide their contempt for the black people. The character who looms largest among the whites is the detective Robbertse and we are told of him: ’he hated to see any coloured man holding his head up, he hated to see any coloured man anywhere but on his

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knees or his stomach.1 And he and his fellow whites are swift to prove this. Maarman is killed and his widow is given three days to clear off the farm, since the house she had

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occupied with her husband will soon be needed for her husband's replacement. Paton, like many black writers, shows the resilience of the black people in face of suffering. On hearing of her husband's death, for instance, Sara Maarman is shown to be well-schooled in suffering: 'But she wept only a little, like one who is used to such events, and must not grieve but must prepare for the n e x t , ' ^ She leaves the farm at the end of the story strengthened in her resolve to make a new life for herself with her son in the Cape.

Jack Cope's fA Pound of Flesh' similarly describes the dignity of black rural workers in circumstances of enormous hardship. Schalk Dawel, the white farmer, rules a small farm-kingdom in the South African heartland with a tyrannical hold. Black people of the area are tied to his service in a form of debt bondage. One such person is Abram, an ancient shepherd who has herded the flocks of this man and his father before him, for decades. Abram seek permission to return to the farm-yard and pass his last days there in the company of his people. Dawel refuses, thrusting before the old man a list of fictitious debts which bind the shepherd to his service. Abram is forced to return to his lonely sheep station and there settles down to die. In the final scene of the story Dawel, the district surgeon, and the local policeman inspect the old man's corpse and Dawel appropriates all the money Abram had saved in order to defray the costs of a number of debts he has invented. The image which remains as strong as this picture of a cruel man is that of Abram accepting his fate with a dignified kind of

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stoicism, knowing all the while that justice lies with him and that one day things will change. As he remarks to Long-Piet, the black man who is sent to accompany him back to the sheep station,' ".. .one day he [the white man] also will stand at the slaughter pole"'.^

Along with works, of this kind by Paton and Cope, there are a number of stories by black writers on this theme, many of which similarly evoke the dignity of these people under difficult circumstances: among them are James Matthews’s ’Crucifixion' and 'The Awakening', Mtutuzeli Matshoba's 'A Glimpse of Slavery', and

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Alex La Guma's 'The Lemon Orchard'. As in 'A Pound of Flesh', La Guma's novel Time of the Butcherbird also suggests the approaching nemesis for white people largely in relation to black people living in the countryside. Interestingly, stories of this kind about black rural workers are rare in Afrikaans literature, with writers only during the 1970's and 1980's beginning to consider the plight of these people. Before this, however, the countryside in by far the greater number of their works was either the site of the Afrikaner's heroic past or of the authors' colourful childhoods. For white English-speaking writers, who generally have had only passing contact with the countryside, there were few myths and illusions about this world.

Anger at conditions in South Africa lies close to the surface in many stories by Jack Cope. 'The Bastards', for example, describes the way a conglomerate consisting of wealthy Afrikaner politicians, farmers, and businessmen expropriate land owned by

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black people in order to open a diamond mine there. Compensation is meagre and the black people can do little to stop their land being snatched from them. Cope sets the nobility and refinement of these black people, called Basters

(Bastards) because of miscegenation among their ancestors, in striking contrast to the behaviour of the 'New Afrikaners' who dispossess them of their land. There is little doubt, however, as to whom the title of the story most properly refers. As in Jan Rabie's Afrikaans stories 'Drie Kaalkoppe eet tesame' ('Three bald heads eat together') and 'Dies Irae' and, indeed, in similar fashion to the celebrated conclusion of Orwell's Animal Farm, Cope's central image of human acquisitiveness is that of a mammoth feast, where the greed of an exploitative group is literally figured in their gorging themselves beyond satiety.^ Evoking a grim irony in the situation, Cope's Afrikaners organize their eating in a triumphal banquet set in the middle of the Kalahari desert on the site of their newly acquired land. The former owners of this land, the Basters, are left to look on this fantastic invasion from a polite and measured distance.

Anger also erupts in Cope's stories by way of the fiery outbursts his aggrieved characters utter. However, in certain