Diary of a Bad Year: Fiction by J. M. Coetzee

Author:J. M. Coetzee [Coetzee, J. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143114482
Amazon: 0143114484
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2008-10-27T21:00:00+00:00

The city-born child bears no mark of the bush. There is no “painful transition to modernity” to be undergone. The black children whom my parents patronized were more modern than they, who had themselves as young people migrated from farms and rural backwaters to the cities and still retained the manners of a country upbringing.

Nor was I immune from their error. During the years when Cape Town was my home, I thought of it as “my” city not just because I had been born there but above all because I knew the history of the place deeply enough to see its past in palimpsest beneath its present. But to the bands of young blacks who roam its streets today looking for action, it is “their” city and I am the outsider. History has no life unless you give it a home in your consciousness; it is a load no free person can be forced to take on.

People see what they call a crime wave sweeping the new South Africa, and shake their heads. What is the country coming to, they say. But the wave is anything but new. When they installed themselves on the land three centuries ago, settlers from northwestern Europe opened themselves to the same practice of raiding (raiding of livestock, raiding of women) that marked relations between bands or tribes already resident there. Raiding, in southern Africa of early colonial times, had a peculiar conceptual status.

You have got it wrong, Mister C. Old thinking. Wrong analysis, as Alan would say. Abuse, rape, torture, it doesn’t matter what: the news is, as long as it is not your fault, as long as you are not

Since there was no body of law governing relations between groups, it could not be called an offence at law. At the same time it was not quite warfare. It was more like a sport, a cultural activity with serious undertones, like the annual contests, sublimations of battle, played or played out between neighbouring towns in the Europe of yesterday, in which the young men of one town would try to take by force some talismanic object guarded and defended by the young men of another town. (These contests would later be formalized as ball games.)

There are thousands of people from the black areas of South Africa, particularly young men, who get up each morning and, either individually or in bands, set off on raids into the white areas. To them, raiding is their business, their occupation, their recreation, their sport: seeing what they can grab and take back to their homes, preferably without a fight, preferably eluding the professional defenders of property, the police.

Raiding was a nagging thorn in the flesh of the governors of the colony, threatening a cycle of tit-for-tat reprisals that might escalate into warfare. What came to be called apartheid was a newfangled social-engineering response to a practice that generations of armed farmers had failed to stamp out. After the 192os, as South Africa’s cities began to take on their modern multi-ethnic look,

responsible, the dishonour doesn’t stick to you.

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