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  • Per omnia saecula saeculorum” or “Inkaba yakho iphi?”:Indigeneity in Alex La Guma and Aidan Higgins
  • James Gifford

Both Alex La Guma, in relation to South Africa, and Aidan Higgins, in relation to Ireland, stress a vital relationship between subjectivity and territory. Both also vividly bond social consciousness to an indigenous sense of rootedness in place, and for both it is a place of ancestors from which subjectivity emerges and to which it returns. This surprises given the metaphysical rather than materialist concepts with which this figuration aligns. They also share a complex decolonizing vision contextualized in both instances by the Marxist understandings of class and settler colonialism that shaped postcolonial discourses of the 1960s. Hence, this article draws on theories of indigeneity in contrast to theories of social conflict based on class to consider the importance of situatedness and belonging in two colonial and postcolonial novels of South Africa and Ireland. In Langrishe, Go Down (1966), Higgins presents the struggles of the Anglo-Irish Langrishe family in Ireland amidst their despairing collapse, but he does so in a postcolonial moment and in the generic conventions of the Big House novel. In contrast, La Guma’s In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (1972) viscerally depicts the struggle against apartheid in South Africa by coloured and black South Africans as well as the tensions between English and Afrikaner communities. Both novels were written looking to the past, and a very specific moment in the past. Both also locate an indigenous identity in the bond to physical space: that is, a localist understanding of indigenous peoples in their traditional territories, which doubles as an ancestral bond marked in both books by a language that is not the author’s mother-tongue, Latin and isiXhosa. For Higgins, Imogen Langrishe’s deep bond to the land emerges in Latin after her sister Helen’s failed attempt at integration, and for La Guma we see Elias Tekwane’s indigeneity expressed in isiXhosa. For both, this bond reflects a materialist understanding of conflict and change, yet in the same moment it expresses a metaphysical identification with ancestors and situatedness [End Page 171] in territory. The language inheres in a tradition that is bound to ancestors and the repetition of ancestors in the land despite the macro-level materialist discourse of class conflict emerging from economic conditions. Moreover, both authors wrote their respective novels during an absence from the homeland. It is more surprising, though, that both books first developed in South Africa: Higgins’s novel was first sketched during his time in South Africa and Zimbabwe, and La Guma’s was only completed during his exile.

This article argues for an overlapping notion of indigeneity in their works articulated using critical Aboriginal Studies while exploring the materialist emergence of identity. The key tension, then, is not between both authors’ progressive politics nor the real differences between their Irish and South African settings—the tension is the in-betweenness of their shared difficulty articulating a form of indigeneity and artistic expression that does not conflict with a materialist history and the theoretical precepts of their anticolonial vision. This is to say, both La Guma and Higgins work to express a metaphysical localist understanding of indigeneity while retaining the characteristically materialist notions of decolonization of the 1960s. Rather than a faulty logic, this understanding of colonialism and indigeneity is plural and reflects the “in-between” nature of their experiences.

Transplanting/Translating Discourses of Indigeneity

Much critical discourse on indigeneity has relied on the political and juridical apparatus of the over-determining state and accompanying forms of economic development.1 In American Indian studies, the cosmopolitan/nationalist conflict reflects this,2 and it is most recently visible in Sean Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks, which uses Fanon’s materialist discourse amidst localist indigeneity. In an Australasian context, David Welchman Gegeo provides a strong example of the emphasis on legal status through customary ownership in Malaita against the legal fiction of terra nullius, although the bonds of spiritual kinship and a metaphysical bond to place remain present:

First and foremost, place (kula ni fuli, literally, “place situated in source,” that is, place of...

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