Interview with Mandla Langa, Sandton, South Africa, 20 July 2001

Introduction

I first became aware of the writing of Mandla Langa when I opened up his novel, Tenderness of Blood, sometime in the mid-1990s.¹ From the first paragraph, I was captivated by the intensity of the prose and the fate of the characters. The novel deals with issues of loyalty and betrayal at both the personal and political level. These issues are all too familiar to anyone who was involved with the South African liberation struggle — one wishes they were not so familiar — and they are no doubt familiar to anyone who has been involved in any political struggle.

The South African liberation struggle was infused with a special mystique. For many it symbolized the ultimate struggle against racial oppression and for democracy, a pivotal battle in the struggle for democracy and development in the African continent, and simultaneously a battle against capitalism and for social and economic justice. All these forms of social oppression and exploitation were seen by many to be thoroughly interconnected in the South African case; hence, eliminating one, many people believed, would automatically lead on to the elimination of the next. This struggle, symbolizing so many people's dreams and visions for the future, became mythologized.

Tenderness of Blood takes us inside the liberation struggle, allowing us to see it from the perspectives of some of those who were involved in it and to see the foibles, weaknesses and limitations of the individuals involved in that struggle. Those who performed courageous political acts could also lack emotional courage in their close relationships; personal failures could impel individuals to take great political risks. The novel is an intimate account of one man's political and emotional journey in the 1970s from his student days at Fort Hare to his imprisonment on Robben Island. The name of the novel's protagonist, Mkhonto, is an allusion to Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), meaning spear of the nation — the armed-struggle organization linked to the African National Congress (ANC).

In writing about South African fiction of the 1980s, Stephen Clingman argues that the 1980s represented a turning point. Prior to that, South African fiction had been concerned with representing the past and the present. South African fiction of the 1980s, he contends, was much more preoccupied with speculations of the future. He also suggests that black fiction writers were more concerned with collective agency, while white writers highlighted the individual.² Tenderness of Blood does not, however, fall into this schema. As well as the continuous tensions between the personal and the political that are unveiled in the novel, there is a constant conversation between the past, the present and the future, anticipated society and between Mkhonto's own past, present and uncertain future.

Much of the novel's background draws on the author's own experiences. Mandla Langa was born in Durban in 1950 and was raised in the African township of KwaMashu, near Durban. As a child he showed an early interest in art and story-telling, and he combined these two interests by drawing cartoons to tell stories. He studied for a B.A. at the University of Fort Hare. Arrested in 1976, he subsequently fled the country and went into exile in Botswana. During his exile years in Africa, he trained in MK camps in Angola and began to write prose in earnest. In Europe he worked for the ANC and was its cultural representative. He has published two other novels and a collection of short stories and has written a musical opera, "Milestones", in collaboration with the jazz musician Hugh Masekela.³ He is currently chairperson of the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA).

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AD: The journalist and cultural writer Mark Gevisser has written that your collection of short stories, The Naked Song and Other Stories, deals with the trauma...