The most common question I encounter from friends and strangers alike is: “How do you find the time to write?”
Some would elaborate: “You run a university, you visit schools, you speak at all kinds of religious and civic organisations, you conduct educational research, you do workshops and training for university managers and school leaders, you are a sports junkie, you have a family…”
My answer is a simple one: “I love two things in life, eating and writing. Nobody has ever asked me where I find the time for eating.”
The point, of course, is that when you enjoy what you do, and it becomes a habit of the heart, you make time for it.
It has indeed been one of the most fulfilling parts of my life to be able to write – columns for two newspapers, occasional pieces on invitation (like this one), research papers for journals, academic books, popular books, and then of course my Facebook and Twitter postings called “Letters to my children”.
With the latter I am in the process of writing 365 short letters (crisp statements, actually, one a day for a whole year) to my two biological children, first, but also to my 33 165 “children” who are students at the University of the Free State.
Most of what I write is to fill a lacuna in the ecology of local writings – stories about hope.
Of course I write to criticise a new government policy or to lambaste poor leadership decisions, but even then the message I seek to convey is that we can do better, and that in the midst of the horrible there is the hope.
Which brings me to some observations about local writing.
I have had the privilege of being a judge for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Awards for non-fiction books.
What this means is that somewhere in December a courier service drops large boxes of books on my doorstep to read, and I have to to submit evaluations of each book for discussion in a circle of really smart book people.
You do not have to worry about spending loads of cash on holiday readings; you get the books, for free.
I am also a bookshop addict, so you are likely to find me window-shopping in small and “exclusive” bookshops on any day or night of the week.
All of this is to say that I have a pretty good idea about what we write on the local scene, and of course what we do not write.
Without question the fastest-growing genre of books has to do with pain. There is the pain of the defeated, reflected in books suddenly springing up on the border wars.
These authors are typically middle-aged white men who have found enough security in the lapse of time to “come out”, so to speak, and write about what happened on the borders of South Africa with Angola, inside occupied territories like Namibia, and through foreign country invasions such as into Mozambique.
It is horrible, and you cannot understand the explosions of anger among white middle-aged men (and their male offspring) until you understand the horrors that people inflicted, and experienced, during those years.
Some of these men write to defend their actions.
They bought and still buy into the lie that they were fighting terrorists who were the handmaidens of Soviet communism and if it were not for their sacrifices as conscripts, South Africa today would be a little Moscow at the tip of Africa.
More than one apartheid general has written his own book in this vein. I suppose this is one way of preventing madness – to reassure your conscience with standard myths of another time.
Other men write to bemoan their fate at having made such sacrifices. Guilt comes through, and a rush of anger.
This is the generation of Chris Louw of the Boetman-series fame, who complained bitterly in a series of letters (“Boetman is die bliksem in”) to Wimpie de Klerk (brother of the last white president, FW de Klerk) of being misled by minority rule into being sent to fight in meaningless border wars. Louw committed suicide in December 2009.
A third group of men write down the middle, that is, without judgement or right or wrong, simply about their experiences, as if the cross-border excursions were as normal as visiting a foreign country on holiday; this is another way of warding off madness: pretend that nothing happened.
But there are the many books on the pain of the victor, and these tend to win the Paton prizes.
These books reveal the search for healing of the wounds inflicted by a racist order, whether on the author her/himself, or on family members, or on comrades in the struggle for freedom.
These are difficult books to read for those who lived through the horrors of the 1970s and onwards, but they have, I suppose, their own therapeutic value in the lives of writers and readers.
In both cases of books, whether those dealing with the conquered or the victors, partisan pain remains the organising logic.
That is to say, few of these books seek to understand the pain of the other side or write in a way that brings out the humanity of both sides in an honest way.
Two books break this mould.
First it was Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s brilliant book, A Human Being Died That Night, based on interviews with apartheid assassin Eugene de Kock, in which she begins to reveal mutual vulnerability, even affection, as perpetrator and victim begin the very human process of talking to each other in order to understand.
More recently there is the remarkable book, Stones Against the Mirror, by Hugh Lewin, describing the fragility of even the closest of comradely friendships under the pain of torture during the years of struggle. His efforts to restore a comrade relationship and forgive a broken friend result in one of the most hopeful human stories you will find this side of apartheid.
If South African writing is to go beyond the rehearsal of pain, whether of the victor or the defeated, it has to start telling stories of hope and healing that give our young people a sense that there are possibilities beyond the present for a very different country.
Okay, I’ve got to rush now. The final of the Tri-Nations rugby tournament is about to start; and I need to eat.
l Professor Jansen is rector and vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State. His latest book is We Need to Talk. - Cape Times