Justin Cartwright on White in Africa

What is African literature?

It comes in different varieties. One is African literature written by Africans, and which in South Africa has a particular dimension. Another is white writers writing about Africa. Some people deny there’s any such thing as “white writing” but in fact there clearly is. White writing is a phrase used by John Coetzee [Nobel Prize for Literature 2003]. It’s about the predicament of the white person in Africa – people who have been dropped down, willingly or unwillingly, in an alien environment, and who try to make an accommodation with it. Now a writer like Nadine Gordimer [Nobel Prize for Literature 1991] thinks she’s made such an accommodation with Africa that there is no such thing as white writing at all, but when you look at her books they’re essentially about the same problem: the white man in Africa. It goes back to Conrad and probably further.

Who would you like to start with?

Let’s start with Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe. Achebe is black, but we would think of this book as extremely European and dating back to an older writing tradition in Africa, aimed at people who have an English or British education. It’s a totally wonderful book about a man who engineers a coup in a West African country and what happens to him. Remarkable resonances now, of course. But it’s about what happens to him and his group of friends. The whole coup fails, the conspirators variously executed or assassinated, but it ends up with a fairly ritualistic ceremony in which, despite everything, African values reassert themselves.

Despite what?

In spite of the country’s Westernisation. It’s a Sandhurst trained army officer who tries to take over the country. But what Achebe is saying is that the country will essentially remain African.

And what would that African-ness comprise?

I think it would comprise a large dependence on ritual and traditional African beliefs. Ben Okri, writer of The Famished Road, once gave me an example of that. He told me that if a businessman, going to a meeting with British Airways on some important contract, saw a chicken in the road on the way, he’d go to a soothsayer to ask what that chicken was trying to tell him, even at the risk of being late for the meeting.

Let’s talk about Coetzee. He’s a white South African émigré like you, isn’t he? Though he lives in Australia.

If you have an interest in Western culture, or particularly in high art as Coetzee does, you discover that in South Africa there is actually no role for you any longer. And I think that Disgrace is a sort of farewell note to South Africa – a “Goodbye, I’m off”. What happens in Disgrace, which is also relevant I think to Achebe, is that the protagonist’s daughter is raped by a local warlord – a local “big man” – and she accepts it as the way things happen in Africa. But her father does not accept it. He’s left the university because he doesn’t like the new political correctness there, and then his daughter is raped and she just accepts it. She’s not happy about it but she certainly doesn’t think of leaving the country. Her father, on the other hand, can’t accommodate himself to it, and neither can Coetzee. I’ve recently read the last volume of his autobiography and what I take away from it is that he thinks there is no meeting place between Western and African culture. He’s not anti-African, but he says explicitly there is no common cause.

And is this your view as well?

It’s slightly more complex. What Coetzee says is that he was never a joiner, so that even though he was deeply distressed by what his own people, the Afrikaners, were doing, he nevertheless identified with them. He would never have joined any overt political movement – the ANC or any of the other alternatives. And before I came to university here in England I had the same sort of option. We were all virulently against apartheid, but I couldn’t see why I’d join a Marxist or Trotskyite organization because I was against apartheid. I was a liberal. So from Coetzee’s point of view it was more that his love of European literature meant that he couldn’t fit himself into what this multicultural society in South Africa was producing. My take is much the same on that. It’s the difference between those who join the latest politically fashionable party and those who may sympathise but who cannot accommodate or truncate themselves in order to fit the offered category. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons comes to mind.

A Good Man in Africa by William Boyd sounds a bit lighter, perhaps – more humorous.

It is. Boyd was brought up in Ghana and Nigeria. It’s about the white man in Africa again, but it is lighter. It’s not insensitive, it’s quite sensitive to African life, but it’s really a comedy. It’s about a young diplomat’s life: an undersecretary in the embassy of a country quite like Ghana. It has elements of an old theme, the white man being treated as something extremely special in Africa whether he wants to be or not.

And why do you think that is?

My own take is that Africans want to know how it is that white men have got their hands on all the money.