Revelations
Mongane Wally Serote
Jacana
REVIEW: Bongani Kona
Imraan Coovadia, in his brilliant essay, Midnight, writes that “science has yet to create a satisfactory description of time, an account of why it exists and how it progresses… the physical time of the cosmos, expressed in the changes of subatomic particles and forces and billion sun galaxies, differs from historical time, with its emphasis on economic and cultural processes, and also from the psychological time of human beings”.
The premise of Coovadia’s essay, which appears in the collection Load Shedding: Writing on and over the Edge of South Africa, is that while we may share the same living space “we don’t have a national relationship with time. We live by different clocks.”
Depending on who you ask or what you read, the country is either on the up-and-up or going fast down the road to perdition.
In Mongane Wally Serote’s latest novel, Revelations, there is no absolute break between historical temporalities.
Apartheid, post-apartheid and the post post-apartheid South Africa are all intimately entangled in this moving novel as it grapples with the present, and ponders the future while attempting to come to terms with the past.
Revelations centres on the life of Otsile, a photographer and former member of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the underground and military wing of the ANC.
The greater part of the novel is taken up by Otsile’s travels with his mentor, the renowned painter, Bra Shope.
The novel begins with the opening of Bra Shope’s exhibition, In Truth We Reconcile, in Santiago, Chile, shortly after the arrest of Augustus Pinochet in 1998.
While in Santiago, the two men meet Sarah who shares with them tales of life under Pinochet’s dictatorship.
She says: “A man I know brought me my lover’s hands in a plastic bag and he asked me, ‘Where are your other comrades?’ He put the plastic bag on the table with Kbio’s hands inside. I knew them, even though they weren’t on him, I knew them…”
From Chile they also visit Zimbabwe “where the issues of the past were alive in the warm sunshine of that beautiful country”, and Mozambique.
During these travels parallels are drawn between South Africa and the traumas experienced by other societies.
And the questions that arise are: Can a humane society be built at the edge of the grave? Can such societies ever be free of their own ghosts? Can victims of atrocities co-exist with their perpetrators? Or, as Otsile’s wife, Teresa, asks at one point: “Could Pinochet repent, or is there no such thing?”
The theme of entanglement between past, present and future is further embodied in Teresa, a headstrong lawyer who is also a ngaka, an intercessor between the living and the ancestors.
She tells Otsile: “We’ve liberated our country physically, now we have to emancipate its spirit.”
She is a vital link between generations.
I might add Serote, among his many other accomplishments, is also a sangoma.
Nonetheless, traditional African beliefs and Christianity have historically been uneasy bed fellows and it’s no different in Revelations.
“I didn’t want to lose Teresa to an argument about religion,” Otsile confides to the reader. “It had already been too costly for us as Africans.
“This young religion on the African continent, Christianity, had cost us dearly indeed, but we had made friends with Christ and asked him daily since then to liberate us from the West.”
But perhaps the central question that Revelations sets out to address is what does it mean to be black in the post-liberation South Africa? Is winning political freedom enough? The answer, as both Otsile and Serote will admit, is no.
In one of the most poignant passages in this book, Otsile tells his teenage son, Seabe, and his adopted daughter, Mantwa: “We lost thousands of the 1976 generation during the protests. Later, the 80s generation were shot recklessly, while those before them were detained, exiled and killed.
“And since 2000 we’ve been burying the Aids youth… When we fought for freedom I didn’t know that when we finally defeated apartheid, we’d inherit all the devastation it caused.”
He adds: “Not only have we inherited it but we’ve become responsible for undoing it, while those who created it try to hold the moral high ground and blame us for failing to heal it quickly enough.”
Sigmund Freud, in his seminal text, Mourning and Melancholia, argues that the difference between the latter and the former is that mourning allows the grieving subject to heal by letting go of the lost person or object while melancholia pathologically refuses to let go, thereby incapacitating the subject’s ability to heal.
Otsile, throughout his narration, comes across as melancholic.
The source of his melancholia stems from asking the first question any grieving person would ask, why?
Perhaps, in our search for answers to the difficult questions Serote asks, we may figure out ways to transcend our long history of racial conflict and build a society free from its ghosts.
l Kona is an M Phil candidate at the Centre for African Studies at UCT.