Thank you very much for the welcome, for the introduction. Good evening to you all, it’s lovely to be here.
I am deeply grateful to the Mandela Foundation for their invitation to deliver this year’s Nelson Mandela Memorial Lecture. It is an honour to address you in a forum such as this, which seeks to memorialise and celebrate the achievements and the courage of a great man. His overwhelming achievement is, of course, to lead the struggle of his country to freedom. His courage was evident in the odds he, and his comrades and his people, had to overcome to sustain that struggle.
When the invitation was first extended to me, it came with the suggestion that I speak to the theme, which is the title of this talk, “Realising Our Shared Humanity”. It seemed a daunting suggestion at first, as if I might be able to come up with proposals of how we might realise this goal. As I have found out over the last three years or so, the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature sometimes means that you are required to be an expert on many things, including predicting the future.
I was reassured by the explanation that followed the suggested topic of the lecture, and I will quote a few lines from it:
“Shared humanity to us is the notion that, as human beings, we are all one family and that there should be a deep sense of caring for one another regardless of differences such as race, religion and nationality.
“Having a sense of shared humanity means being committed to championing justice … and to demand profound care for the environment and for other species. In an international context, our sense of shared humanity should guide our understanding of justice and inspire us to pursue justice beyond the borders of our respective communities and countries.”
So that was the paragraph as it was. So then I took it that I was invited to reflect on our shared humanity, rather than to propose its realisation, which I was happy and much relieved to do.
In preparing for this reflection, I tried to recall my earliest memory of South Africa, that is, when it was that I first heard or knew anything about it. I think it was about 1960, when I was a 12-year-old schoolboy in Zanzibar. For us this was a time of unprecedented excitement as the politics of decolonisation were approaching a climax. It was a year of elections for us, and the surprise of the first election riots. I remember us schoolboys crowding to the classroom windows as men chased each other up and down the street in front of the school, wielding clubs and throwing stones. We did not know then that this would become a regular and regrettable event for us and for other African nations, when mistrust would make citizens suspicious of their rulers. What we did not know allowed us to feel only the excitement of the approaching end of colonialism.
Part of the excitement was also because the politics and the campaign were continental, or indeed global, and names such as Kwame Nkrumah, Abdel Nasser, Nehru and Marshall Tito (as we called him) became familiar names to us. It was also, 1960 as you well know, it was also the year of Sharpeville. It was also the year of Albert Luthuli’s Nobel Peace Prize, both events which made a huge impact on Africans everywhere. In 1961, at independence, Tanganyika adopted “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” as its national anthem, with words in Kiswahili translation. In a more prosaic way, I came to know about South Africa because the sense of solidarity that arose out of the decolonisation activities led to boycotts of South African products. I think, actually, that was the first awareness of South Africa for me.
We were still some years away from independence at the time, and the administration was fully in British hands, so the boycott was nothing to do with the authorities, was nothing to do with the instruction from an African government, but the decision of ordinary people. What did we boycott? I don’t know if it made any difference to the South African economy, but suddenly South African orange juice disappeared from store shelves, as did various tinned jams and fruit. In the meantime, though, South Africa had sailed into my vision and remained there since then.
In part this greater awareness of South Africa was also to do with Tanganyika, as it then was, playing host to southern African liberation movements, and somehow the national project of Tanganyika, for a while, included the struggle of the people these movements represented.
I remember well walking past the ANC offices near Mnazi Moja in Dar es Salaam. The offices were established after a 1962 visit by Nelson Mandela, and were followed by offices of Frelimo and Swapo. By then we knew well about the oppression these people toiled under, and their leaders joined the names of the other African heroes we celebrated.
I mentioned a while ago that the early 1960s was a period of unprecedented excitement – or at least so it seemed to people of my generation – and that this excitement was continental or even global. I think decolonisation made the world smaller, allowed us to feel a new solidarity, so that war in Algeria, apartheid in South Africa and the civil rights struggle in the United States seemed also part of us. Photographs of police atrocities during the March in Birmingham, United States, in 1963 could just as well have been photographs of apartheid police raids on a South African township.
This solidarity I am speaking of, derives in part from a shared experience of oppression under colonialism and racism, and I think it has endured and strengthened in the decades since then. At that time, South Africa and its struggles commanded the sympathy of many millions in the world, but especially in Africa. For many people, that struggle was symbolised not only by the stoicism of its people but also by the endurance of its imprisoned leaders, above all by Nelson Mandela.
For a while in those years in the early 1960s, when some of us were just coming into knowledge of the racist hegemony that was in control of the southern regions of Africa, it did not seem possible that such powerful and mean-spirited domination could end – just as now, when we watch and read about the destruction and deaths in Gaza, it seems impossible to imagine how this injustice will end. Day after day we watch and hear the atrocities taking place in Gaza, daily, increasingly sophisticated, and many thousands across the world express in what ways they can their disgust and pain at this continuing slaughter. Yet it seems that Israel’s leaders are not yet done.
In this respect, I applaud the actions of the South African government to take the case of Gaza to the International Court of Justice and to invite even greater condemnation of these tragic events. The court’s ruling and its warrants will only be more words, in the end, and words will not end this or other injustices, will not rebuild schools or hospitals, or end detentions and the destruction of cities. But there are times when words is all we have, words and sympathy, and an understanding of our comparable experiences, our shared humanity.
Many years ago, as an undergraduate student – it was many years ago – I read these lines, which have stayed with me as a persuasive way of thinking about words. I’m quoting:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years –
[…]
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. (202-3)
The lines, as some of you are sure will have recognised, are from “East Coker”, the second of The Four Quartets, which TS Eliot wrote during the Second World War. The pessimism that comes through here is not only an expression of the unreliability and duplicity of words, not a loss of faith, but a declaration of the meagerness of an individual writer’s offering. This section of the poem ends in this way, and once again, I’m quoting:
And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate – but there is no competition –
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. (203)
Eliot was in the throes of returning to Christianity at this point, and the humility he gently advocates in these lines is informed by his religious beliefs. What also comes through though is an understanding of literature as a vital and continuous human activity, and if he is inclined to privilege the longevity of this activity, and to associate it with a certain tradition and hierarchy – those “men whom one cannot hope to emulate” – it is not because he rejects newness and experimentation. Both his writing elsewhere and his argument here demonstrate a desire to rediscover or to reinstate what he considers important in literature. It is not that words have no force, but that the writer has to approach his or her engagement with them in some care and even an expectation of failure, and with an awareness of what has been written before.
It was words that made it possible for me to have any real inkling of the experience of a South African. It was in the late 1960s that I first read the work of the many brilliant South African writers of that period. Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy (1946) was a revelation in my teens, and there were so many others that came later, and afterwards became part of my work and my life. Words is also my profession, and it’s what has brought me here. Although it is perhaps not completely the case to say that words is my profession, because words are largely a means of articulating our reflections and not an end in themselves. That articulation is what I mean by literature, an activity which is both the story and something beyond the story. So now I will speak briefly about that and its importance in our lives.
What is important about literature? Let me say to begin with that the person who asks “what is the point of literature?” is not going to be satisfied with whatever answer you give him or her. That person has not considered how vital story, song and dance are, and have always been, to the very existence of a human community, not as ornaments or distraction, but as the acts that enable empathy and solidarity and self-recognition in a coeval atmosphere.
First of all literature gives us pleasure, a profound pleasure which is not about making us smile or lighter of heart, but a pleasure which engages us and broadens our minds. If we do not feel this pleasure in reading a book or listening to an oration, we stop and put the book away, or we switch off and stop listening.
Secondly, literature brings us news, it tells us about matters we did not know or from a perspective we had not considered before. That is what I had in mind when I mentioned a moment ago that it was words that gave me an inkling of South African realities. When I say news, I do not simply mean facts and information, but something that forces an engagement to the point of anguish. A text that always comes to mind for me in this respect is Alexander Solzhenistyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). Even if you had known something about the labour camps and the prison system in the Soviet Union, this text forces you into a deep and felt awareness of the brutal assault on the human spirit that incarceration in the gulag meant. When you learn that the prisoners are marched out of the labour camp to the day’s work site in temperatures of -48°C, imagination almost fails because such knowledge is beyond your experience, yet you learn that people endure even against such ordeals.
Then literature also tells us about what we do know, it reassures us that our understanding of the world is shared, that how we feel is also felt by others. In other words, it reassures us about our humanity.
I mentioned a while ago the great excitement of the decolonising years in the early 1960s, and since then many nations have gained their freedom from overbearing European power. Not everything has turned out well, and what we have come to understand is that the consequences of colonialism are still with us. European colonialism in Africa and elsewhere did not come in only one form, and its consequences are various, both historically and in the contemporary world. Most colonial activity in Africa was brutal and extractive, with predictable results in economic and political instability. Its legacy continues today in the impossible civil societies that are postcolonial nations, with their divisions and oppositions, and the widespread deprivation that often results in warfare and irresolvable contention. Since no one is willing to give up an inch of territory, or can only do so in bad faith and violence – Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, DRC, to name current crises – there is no option but to continue in hope that patience and resolution will enable a better future. Every age believes that it lives in tumultuous times, and our age is troubled by political uncertainties and environmental danger.
I started by referring to the words of the brief the Mandela Foundation presented to me as part of their invitation to give this address: “Realising Our Shared Humanity”. I will end with the following wise words, which were also part of that brief. I quote:
“We live in a world in which global politics is a major issue in our lives and will continue to be as we grow ever more connected to each other. Not only does what happens beyond the borders of our respective countries affect us in economic, social and even emotional ways, but international dynamics are also evolving as the global order is being reimagined and reorganised.”
Thank you very much.