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Research in African Literatures 32.3 (2001) 155-176



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Special Issue: Nationalism

Speaking Places: Prison, Poetry, and the South African Nation

Rita Barnard


Ernest Renan's definition of the essence of a nation--"that all individuals must have a lot in common and also that they must all have forgotten a great deal"--has perhaps never seemed so apt as it does in the case of postapartheid South Africa (Bhabha 11). Indeed, the history of that country's transition to democracy has at times been so stirring that one could be forgiven for applying Renan's observation in the positive way he intended--without the irony that recent theorizing on the nationalism would teach us to detect in it. Consider the following account of Nelson Mandela's joyous inauguration ceremony in 1994:

Out of the south came a formation of planes that rocked in their flight and their engine noise filled the sky. And behind them came jets that released trails of smoke: black, green, red, white. And behind them came helicopter gun ships flying the new flag from their undercarriages. Which was when people raised their arms and began to shout: "They are our planes now. They're our planes now."

And a woman broke down in tears and said, "those planes killed my son. But now they belong to us. They belong to the people." (Nicol 70)

This incident, recounted in a generally tough-minded memoir, evokes the elation of national liberation--an experience that metropolitan academics should not presume to treat dismissively. For in South Africa, after decades of violence and racial oppression, the double gesture of sharing and forgetting was both a source of and a testimony to what seemed like a miraculous reprieve--a kind of historical grace.

Mandela's first State of the Nation address, presented in Cape Town two weeks after his inauguration played on precisely the themes raised by Renan. "The time will come," the new president declared,

when our nation will honour the memory of all the sons, the daughters, the mothers, the fathers, the youth, and the children who, by their thoughts and deeds, gave us the right to assert with pride that we are South Africans, that we are Africans and that we are citizens of the world [. . .] we must, constrained by and yet regardless of the accumulated effect of our historical burdens, seize the time to define for ourselves what we want to make of our shared destiny. 1

Mandela's announcement of a new collective identity was no doubt the obvious thing to do on this historic occasion. But what was surprising about his speech was its literary dimension. The president chose to read to those assembled in the formerly whites-only Parliament a poem written in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre: [End Page 155]

The child who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga

The child is not dead
the child lifts his fists against his mother
who shouts Afrika! shouts the breath
of freedom and the veld
in the locations of the cordoned heart
[. . .]
The child is not dead
Not at Langa nor at Nyanga
not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville
nor at the police post at Philippi
where he lies with a bullet through his brain
[. . .]
the child is present at all assemblies and law-giving
the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers
this child who only wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere
the child grown to a man treks on through all of Africa
the child grown into a giant journeys over the whole world
without a pass! 2

The inclusion of this poem in Mandela's speech was significant. Its author was a young woman who in 1965 drowned herself in the Atlantic because she could no longer tolerate the injustices of apartheid. The president's reading of her work was an act of remembrance for this lost daughter of the land. But it was equally an act of forgetting--of the fact that the poet, Ingrid Jonker, was...

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