Apartheid refugees: literature and exile
In August 1960, the Black Sophiatown-born writer and musician, Dugmore Boetie, fled apartheid South Africa and entered Bechuanaland (today Botswana) on foot. He was part of a flow of ‘discontented young men,’ observed by colonial intelligence agents, who included the otherwise unfamiliar Johannes Moeng, Jacob Lesabeer, Spencer Tlhole and Victor Vuysine Vinjike. Security reports at the time portrayed them as mostly ‘obscure’ and rather ‘bewildered’. British colonial security agents routinely monitored the thousands of Black men and women who entered the High Commission Territory because of the risk of reprisals and retaliatory actions by South Africa’s Special Branch police. South African Special Branch spies and agents were known to mix with refugees, making it ‘extremely difficult’ to tell one from the other.
The relatively unknown Boetie was one of thousands of refugees moving north in late 1960, the peak period of an exilic migration that began immediately after the Sharpeville Massacre but had been building for some years as apartheid policies strengthened. It was a movement that swept beyond South Africa’s borders, taking with it some of the country’s greatest literary talents, many of whom were never to return. The future Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer, interviewed in the early 1980s, explained that persecution began with the 1952 Defiance Campaign, the first national organised non-violent resistance to the 1948 Nationalist Party government’s agenda. Noting that ‘people were arrested and the whole political scene got tougher… [but] people left South Africa out of intense frustration rather than danger’.
Many artists, writers, and musicians fled so-called ‘banning orders’, whereby they were prohibited from writing and therefore stripped of their primary income. Banned from teaching, Es’kia Mphahlele went into exile and published Down Second Avenue in London in 1959. The formidable list of censorship provisions on the creative Black writers was one of the many impediments on expression. According to Zimbabwean poet Toby Tafirenyika Moyana, ‘all repressive legislation’ impeded artistic work. Others fled because they were targeted by non-state agents, likely acting as proxies for the apartheid regime. Arthur Maimane detailed his flight to Ghana in 1958 after publishing a series of gripping gang-life stories in Drum magazine. He published the controversial novel Victims in London in 1976. Similarly to Maimane, William ‘Bloke’ Modisane, according to the British editor of Drum, Antony Sampson, left his beloved Sophiatown for the United Kingdom in 1959 after constant harassment and threats from government agents and gang members. He published his powerful autobiography, Blame Me on History, in London in 1963.
The mystery around the origins of Boetie’s Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost reveals how little we know about his creative life during this period. Perhaps unsurprising as Boetie was on the intellectual periphery of the vibrant Sophiatown arts scene. Boetie’s flight in 1960 was soon followed by that of more distinguished artists, writers, journalists, and musicians. Jazz musician, and composer of King Kong, Todd Matshikiza successfully relocated to London with his family in 1961, where he published the remarkable memoir Chocolates for My Wife. Meanwhile Lewis Nkosi exited with the support of a scholarship, a result of his collaborations with filmmaker Lionel Rogosin, and published Home and Exile from New York in 1965.
Others not yet famous, but with good connections or established political allegiances, left South Africa around the same time. The New Age journalist, African National Congress activist, and future poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile went to Dar es Salaam in 1961 and later to the US, an itinerary made possible by his political association and established national profile, publishing Spirits Unchained in Detroit in 1969. Photographer Joseph (Joe) Louw fled in 1962 after being convicted and sentenced for violations of statutes prohibiting interracial sexual relations. He later famously captured the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Novelist Richard Rive left in 1963, and published Emergency, a fictional account of the immediate post-Sharpeville chaos enveloping the country from London. Photographer Ernest Cole initially offered to be an informant following his detainment while photographing arrests for violating the requirements that Black South Africans carry permits or passes whenever they moved out of areas designated ‘Black only’, but later fled using a group of Lourdes pilgrims as his cover.
Dugmore Boetie’s exile and future literary notoriety took a different path to many of these more famous writers. After walking to Dar es Salaam, he tried and failed to get to London. Between 1961-62 he made the decision to return to Johannesburg. By abandoning his would-be refugee status and somehow finding his way back to the familiarity of Sophiatown, he realised the earnest hope of so many exiles abroad. Precisely how he returned to South Africa is still unclear.
If you’ve not had the opportunity to read Boetie’s picaresque roman à clef, avail yourself of the pleasure at your earliest convenience. His only full-length work, published posthumously, ought to have appeared under the title Tshotsholoza, which many South Africans will recognise as a traditional mining song and unofficial national anthem, immortalised in King Kong. But behind the scenes, machinations between Barney Simon and the publisher led to adopting the title of one of Boetie’s short stories. Familiarity is a loosely biographical work that parallels the national story of South Africa’s transition from informal racial separatism in the 1920s to formalised statutory apartheid in the 1950s and 1960s through the eyes of a dispossessed child and destitute young man.
As Benjamin has argued elsewhere with Nathan Carpenter, deportation and exile have long, complex, and intertwined legacies in Africa. From the forced removal of kings, queens, chiefs, and ordinary people to the displacement of entire clans from their homelands, or the coerced expatriation of political dissidents and their families, deportation and exile operated as two edges of a single weapon. European colonial regimes all employed exile and deportation—sometimes coupled with threatened or real forced labour—to end dynasties, silence rival chieftaincies, forestall millennial religious movements, and facilitate the seizure of agricultural and pastoral lands for industrial enterprises or settler farmers. Postcolonial regimes revisited these imperial weapons, forcing dissidents, writers and artists, into self-imposed exile.
In the decades since Boetie’s death in 1966, critics and scholars have struggled with how to make sense of his work, its contents, and its composition. Is it a co-production? Is it a collaboration? Or is it largely the result of Boetie’s fertile imagination recreating his own experiences and those told to him by the tsotsis (gangsters) of Sophiatown? Familiarity is not an easy work to categorise. It certainly does not read like the unapologetic and damning indictments of South Africa authored by his contemporaries, such as Mphahlele and Modisane. While Boetie did not live long enough to see it in print, he authored the only book describing apartheid by a Black writer residing in South Africa during the immediate post-Sharpeville period. In this sense Boetie’s return home and publication of Familiarity stands as something of an exception, standing apart, and perhaps in tension with the experience of his refugee contemporaries living in exile. More often we understand South African experiences through its rich diasporic literature, with its core a rarely realised longing for home.
The header image shows the dust jacket of Dugmore Boetie, Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost, 1st Edition, 1969. Source: https://africasacountry.com/2021/08/the-exilic-geographies-of-the-south
