Jim Coetzee's booker prize-winning novel Disgrace was bound to stir up controversy inside South Africa, at a time when its government is grappling with the aftermath of apartheid and is bombarded with terrifying reports of impending anarchy. Coetzee tells a relentlessly grim story about a white liberal professor whose daughter is gang-raped by blacks on a farm: the other blacks refuse to report the crime, and the daughter accepts her fate, apparently as a retribution for past injustices. The book is very readable and dramatic, and it can be read as a prophetic warning of the disintegration of South African society. Certainly it is not likely to encourage foreign tourism-which the government now sees as central to job-creation-or to dispel scare-stories about crime.
But Coetzee is too good a novelist to give a one-sided view. He portrays his white protagonist as unsympathetically as his black counterpart. The power of the book comes from his understanding of white fears and guilts, and from the religious undertones of atonement and salvation-a feature of his equally gloomy novel Waiting for the Barbarians. But the latter was presented as a fable, set in no particular country; while Disgrace is more clearly about contemporary South Africa, and echoes newspaper reports about real atrocities on isolated white farms.
South Africans are divided in their reactions. Coetzee's critics (who seem to be the majority) point to his academic isolation, his secretiveness and his lack of contact with blacks. It is not necessarily a racial divide. Some white writers claim that Coetzee has misrepresented black attitudes; while a black intellectual I met argued that Africans have closed ranks behind people accused of raping whites. Athol Fugard, the veteran South African playwright, co-author of The Island, is exasperated by the story of Disgrace, although he admits to not having read it. "We've got to accept the rape of a white woman as a gesture towards all the evil we did in the past? That's a load of bloody bullshit... Jesus! It's an expression of a very morbid phenomenon, very morbid."
Other critics see Coetzee as merely writing about himself. They recall his memoir, Boyhood, in which he describes his lonely rural upbringing, alarmed by his father and guilty about not standing up for his mother. "All the main protagonists in Coetzee's books," wrote Roland Darroll in the Johannesburg Sunday Independent, "are more or less isolated, enclosed within themselves."
Coetzee is also part of a broader trend among Afrikaner writers. While the Afrikaners have lost political power, their writers have become more acclaimed abroad, with a mastery of English as well as their own language, with an earthy melancholy which gives them, like Southern writers after the American civil war, a special eloquence. Writers such as Andr? Brink, Antjie Krog, Rian Malan or Breyten Breytenbach all display a sense of guilt and ambivalence about their country which is proclaimed in their titles: Country of My Skull, My Traitor's Heart, Dog Heart, Disgrace. They conjure up their family farms, uncles, aunts and grandparents living in a vanished world of order; while denouncing the horrors of apartheid and uneasily confronting the messy aftermath. Their breast-beating is sometimes self-indulgent; but their burning Afrikaner soul gives their work intense energy.
The ambiguity is specially evident in Breyten Breytenbach, the Afrikaner poet who now lives in Paris with his Asian wife. During the apartheid years he joined an ill-organised resistance group to organise sabotage, was caught, imprisoned and released after some bargaining. But in his last book, Dog Heart, he is full of doubts about his country. The radical exile is still attracted by the conservative rural community: the idealist anxiously observes the violence and confusions of post-apartheid freedom. Breytenbach vividly describes white fears and black lawlessness, but he does not offer a serious judgment about the future. He dwells on death and decay. His first sentence is: "To cut a long story short: I am dead." He ends the book in a cemetery. Curiously, Coetzee's review of Dog Heart worried about its emphasis on violence. "The circulation of horror stories," he wrote, "is the very mechanism that drives white paranoia. Why then does Breytenbach lend himself to the process?" It is a question that could just as well be put to the author of Disgrace.
The sense of doom is common to many Afrikaners, but not shared by all white South African writers. A more optimistic view of Africa emerges from the Nobel prize-winner Nadine Gordimer, whose recent book of essays is appropriately called Living in Hope and History-a title borrowed from Seamus Heaney. Gordimer is more interested in black African culture, and its interactions with other cultures. She admires L?opold Senghor, the first president of Senegal, whom Gordimer sees as a model for reconciling cultures-in his case Senegalese and French.
Gordimer looks for the ideal of "cultural wholeness" in South Africa-despite its history of racial conflict-an ideal she finds personified in Mandela, with whom she is very friendly, and who was inspired by her novels while in jail. Gordimer is seen by many black politicians and writers as part of their own movement. And she sees black South Africans, in contrast to African-Americans, as having "had their own earth under their feet," retaining their own names, languages and cultures. "Nothing-neither apartheid denigration nor liberal paternalism-has destroyed their identity. They know who they are."
So how do the black writers see themselves, as they survey these doom-laden books about rapes, murders and torture described by Afrikaners and other whites? The liberation struggle exacted a heavy aesthetic price. The vitality, humour and rebelliousness which characterised the black writers of the 1950s, such as Can Themba, Todd Matshikiza, Lewis Nkosi or Casey Motsisi, was overtaken in later decades by more committed writing in which jokes became difficult.
The transition to power and freedom has taken some time to absorb, while many talented writers are now helping to run the country. "The liberation of South Africa has stripped... all South African writers of the relatively stable frame of reference which prevailed for so long," says the black writer Andries Oliphant in his introduction to the recent anthology of multiracial short stories, At the Rendezvous of Victory.
Young black writers are becoming impatient with the old sagas of the struggle, as they react against their parents. Athol Fugard's 1973 play The Island-which has been triumphantly revived in London, performed by the veteran actors Winston Shona and John Kani-no longer has the same resonance inside South Africa, where Kani is director of the Market Theatre in Johannesburg.
Black South Africa has not yet produced a big novel to compete with Gordimer, Coetzee or Brink; but there are signs of a more liberated black writing, with some of the humour and individuality returning. Journalists like Sandile Dikeni, John Matshikiza or Lizeka Mda have a racy, irreverent style of observation which does not conform to any stereotype, and projects a robust optimism. Of course black writers are still interested in racial tensions. In his short story, Rough Landing, Sandile Dikeni painfully describes the humiliation of a young African in the Cape shack-town, Khayelitsha, wooing a coloured woman, but with a tolerance very different from the bitter stories of earlier decades.
It is still in music-which retained its creativity during the apartheid years-that black South Africans most consistently show their vitality and optimism: whether in sophisticated jazz and rap, or in popular musicals. Johannesburg has become the musical capital of the continent, attracting composers and players from the Congo or west Africa. The current popular success in Johannesburg is the musical The Zulu, by Mbongeni Ngemi. It is a rumbustious show which tells the story of how the Zulu army defeated British troops in 1879-a kind of counterblast to the British film Zulu made in 1963, starring Michael Caine. In the musical the British commander is played as an effete buffoon by a black actor with a drooping moustache, in jodhpurs and a Sam Browne belt, who brings the house down. White and black intellectuals have felt ambivalent about its crude storyline, worried that it encourages Zulu nationalism and a simplified history: it does not mention that the Zulu army was mowed down by the British soon afterwards. But the joyful music and the jokes make it difficult to object seriously.
For now it is the sense of hope and confidence in the future which most obviously distinguishes black culture from white. In his speech at the opening of parliament in February, Thabo Mbeki called South Africa "the land of human hope" and quoted the black poet Wally Serote, who is also a member of parliament, describing the men and women who constitute humanity: they will live in you/ and you in them/ like a story which does not end. "Disgrace" by JM Coetzee (rrp?14.99) can be bought through Prospect Bookshop at ?12.99 plus 99p UK p&p. Call 020 8324 5649
