Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (review)

"Complicities" provides the titularly formulaic basis for Mark Sanders's probing inquiry into the complex and complicated relationships established over nearly a century's history of the evolving relationship between the "intellectual and apartheid." Sanders carefully delineates the definitions of "apartheid" as these were established in law and in practice by the South African state itself, but what he more discerningly investigates are the differentially determined roles of the "intellectual" in apartheid's evolving historical contexts—whether as advocate or apologist—or alternatively as activist and/or accuser. Sanders examines these "complicities"—the tales of what was referred to in the context of the postapartheid hearings of the precedent-setting Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as the "little perpetrator in all of us"—across various conditions and circumstances. Sanders begins with "two colonial precursors," early feminist Olive Schreiner and the country's first black African novelist, Sol Plaatje (although, as he writes, he might have just as interestingly introduced the examples of Jan Smuts and Gandhi in their stead). The historical narrative of "complicities" continues with the instance of N. P. Van Wyck Louw's elaboration of an "Afrikaans culture of criticism," one that complicates the relationship between a loyal resistance and an oppositional posture, as the political relations between South Africa and Europe are reconstituted in the decades separating the 1910 Act of Union and the 1948 formation of a National Party government. The Drum decade of the 1950s provides the context—"apartheid and the vernacular"—for Sanders's critical reading of Bloke Modisane's still puzzling and no less poignant memoir, Blame Me On History, alongside Nadine Gordimer's postulations of a "disaffected African intelligentsia" and A. C. Jordan's rendering of ubuntu and the persistent tensions both within communities and towards strangers. Prison writing is then exemplified by Breyten Breytenbach's Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, with its literary and linguistic highlighting of the discursive complications enjoyed and destroyed by the confrontational—if nonracial—encounters between detainee and interrogator. Steve Biko's death in detention in 1977 raised questions that were silenced by the state's inquest that same year, but raised again during the TRC's amnesty hearings in 1997-98, following which Biko's executioners were denied amnesty for their deed, a brutality that caused Biko, the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, to lose consciousness—and his life. But according to Sanders, Biko nonetheless raised the consciousness of white intellectuals and compatriots such as Nadine Gordimer and Rick Turner, a professor of sociology at the University of Natal in Durban who was himself assassinated by the apartheid state. Finally, and by way of conclusion, Sanders turns to the South Africa's contribution to the global inquiry into "complicities"—the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose two years of hearings into gross violations of human rights during the apartheid years from 1960 to 1994 appealed to South Africa's citizens, both the long and the newly enfranchised, not to "forget to tell us what happened to you yourself. . . ." Sanders's Complicities is both a historical and a philosophical inquiry, and he concludes accordingly: "[I]nsofar as every affiliation, oppositional or otherwise, is a restricted instantiation of that foldedness [in human-being], and thus at risk of barring the way to its being generalized, it has no choice but at once to project itself beyond apartheid" (211). And Complicities does just that.