Letepe Maisela
Johannesburg - It is former president of the United States of America and Harvard Law School Graduate Barack Obama, who opined in his national best-seller aptly named “The Bridge”, that there was a distinct difference between European literary writers and the African-American type.
To paraphrase him, he pointed out that in European literature, a writer writes his or her novels, plays and poems initially. It’s only towards the end of their life term and writing careers, that they pen a memoir-autobiography.
On the other hand, it is rather common among African-American writers to begin their writing lives by penning an autobiography, which he assumed was a way of asserting themselves. He pointed to a further writing peculiarity by African-American writers, which the literary scholar Robert Stepto called “a narrative of ascent”.
In this instance the writer begins in a state of incarceration or severe deprivation. Malcolm X, the cantankerous Civil Rights Activist in the 1960’s United States of America is one such lively example. This is what I could further liken to the rags to riches type of story.
Escaped former slave Frederick Douglass, who later became writer, abolitionist and social reformer, is also such a good example. As he succinctly put it: “you have seen how a man was made a slave, you shall see how a slave is made a man”. Most African writers on the Continent and Diaspora also fall under this narrative of ascent category.
The similarities with the above-named anecdote on the life of Dr Khulu Mbatha in his freshly published book “Scattered” are clear. While it has lots of elements that veers it towards the “narrative of ascent” theme, it is actually not his first but second published book.
His first was tagged “Unmasked: Why the ANC Failed to Govern”, published in 2017. From a young man harassed out of Soweto by the evil South African apartheid state security police, who pursued and ultimately forced him into exile, to a returning hero and cadre of the revolutionary ANC, armed with a Doctorate in Philosophy from an East German University, acquired during the Cold War era, he is your quintessential Struggle icon and his book articulates it all.
Though the novel “Scattered” is mainly about his enforced exile due to the 1976 Soweto Student Uprising, of which he was an active participant, his brushes with the apartheid government officials started much earlier in his life.
This was when his family - father and mother and six siblings were evicted from Western Native Township, now renamed Westbury in 1962. This was at a much fragile youthful age of eight that he admits, with a smirk, he actually enjoyed the government truck ride to Moroka, Soweto and often wished it could happen again. The innocence of the youth.
The removal was in terms of the implementation of the Verwoerdian Policy under The Group Areas Act of 1950, which provided specifically for separation of African people in terms of their tribal affiliation. This was to fulfil the policy of divide and rule, later given a cosmetic description of separate but equal development.
So while in Western Native Township, the natives had co-existed as one, when they were posted to Soweto, this was done according to their tribal affiliation. Soweto townships of the time were classified in terms of tribal groups with sections specifically dedicated to different tribal groupings like Zulu or Sotho, according to the social engineers of the apartheid policy. This says, the author was his first experience of African people being scattered domestically in their land of origin.
The year 1976 simply elevated the experience to a higher level, when he and hundreds other young black South Africans found themselves crossing borders and being domiciled in foreign land within Africa and abroad.
It started with a simple student protest in Soweto against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction to all African schoolchildren. This was done with all the nonchalance and domineering prescriptive arrogance by the authorities of the time.
They hardly expected any opposition, as they were fully in charge of governing the voteless African masses, whose duty was not to reason why, but to obey and do or die, paraphrasing Alfred Tennyson in his much revered poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade“.
In the final analysis that single act of naked kragdigheid by the apartheid government authorities, was to fulfil the worst of the Athenian Ultimatum in the Melian Dialogue which pronounced that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.
Accordingly, in his book Mbatha was “scattered” from South Africa into exile in 1976 but his conscientisation had begun much earlier. As a high school student at Sekano Ntoane, one of the few Soweto High schools, the same school President Cyril Ramaphosa also attended, he had come across teachers like Tom Manthata, who had infused the philosophy of Black Conciousness into him and other students.
The philosophy popularised by Steve Biko and others like Onkgopotse Tiro, played a pivotal role to all those students who were fortunate to come across it, as it completely changed their personal and political outlook. It mostly uprooted the inferiority complex instilled by among others the discriminatory policies of the apartheid regime, that were meant to convince African people that they were an inferior race group and meant to be oppressed.
Black Consciousness simply reversed all those negative perceptions of self by asserting that “Black is beautiful” and that “Blackman, you are on your own”. Though not adequately documented, it is believed by commentators of the time that Black Consciousness was the spark that lit the Soweto Uprising into a raging inferno back on 16 June, 1976, led by the inimitable Tsietsi Mashinini.
Mbatha, then a student of University of Zululand, managed to skip the South African border in October, 1976, into Eswatini, then called Swaziland. The irony of the matter was that while growing up, his own father used to relate to them how he used to jump the border fence now and then in earlier years into Swaziland and back. This was to visit relatives displaced after border posts were overnight introduced by the past colonial authorities.
Out there for the first time in their political lives, they came across the ideological differences between the ANC and PAC in exile, while he and most of 1976 students in exile were products of Black Consciousness. It made their orientation and subsequent adaptation quite difficult. The best they could do at the time was to remain neutral when pulled apart in different ideological directions by ANC and PAC ideologues.
That did not last long as they soon found themselves on a flight – his first, from Maputo to Tanzania where the ANC was to become the main host and benefactor and at last they were given the option to choose between the two major liberation movements. They realised too late then that Black Consciousness ideology did not cross the borders with them into exile.
Like most, he contends that exile was no walk in the park either though he deems himself one of the luckier few, who ended up “scattered” on the European continent than the African bush, where the combatants marched in line like their namesake, the industrial security guards in South Africa called matshingilane.
Tanzania to Khulu Mbatha was almost like a transit camp and he soon found himself on a flight that landed in the GDR – German Democratic Republic, known then as East Germany. There he was admitted to study in a tertiary institution.
From the University of Leipzig he emerged with a Master’s degree and later a Doctorate in Philosophy and a wife. He met his first wife, a Greek Communist named Anna there. The union produced a daughter Dimitra but could not survive the test of living in exile and foreign culture. The daughter remains her cherished princess though.
After the divorce, he met yet another Greek lady who was to become the mother of his son. Her name was Texla Metaxa and they met through a project he was working on in Athens. Later he established an intimate relationship that resulted in the conception and birth of a son born on 27 December, 1990. He was named Nelson, after our Madiba presumably, as he was born the same year he was released from years of incarceration. The parents never married though.
Khulu Mbatha finally arrived back home in 1991 and his life has been like a roller-coaster of public sector careers from being under Mandela’s presidency, the right-hand man of the first Foreign Affairs Minister Alfred Nzo to Special Advisor on International Relations to the incumbent President Ramaphosa and more.
It was a befitting gesture to the story that the book “Scattered” had its first launch on Saturday 16 July, 2022, right where it all started in Soweto at Eyethu Cinema complex. The launch served as an occasion to announce to Mzansi rather belatedly, that all its “scattered” sons and daughters of Soweto were finally assembled back home.
In attendance were among others Pauline Mohale-Buyeye who as part of the Pretoria 12 was the only woman charged and they faced possible death sentences. According to her, all she did was to have driven students across the Eswatini border into exile and military training.
Also there was Dee Mashinini, brother of the late Tsietsi Mashinini.
The book has memorable pictures from the past and is available at major bookstores.
Maisela is an author.