Living as a student in a foreign city, I spent much time browsing through libraries on the streets turning page after page in search of new authors. If you and books have been close companions as long you can remember, you can picture the bliss I felt when I discovered a book-seller with second hand books at unbelievably low prices– you could find anything and everything if you were patient. First I would study the cover then read the blurb and finally the introduction; and once the right chord was struck I would haggle in broken Swahili and go home with a new book to discover.
Dar-es-Salaam was making me view my reading and writing habits with different eyes. Here was a culture committed to sustaining itself in language and ideology. Young people I would expect to be ‘all about the money’, like many back home in Kampala, were lecturing me on the need to keep Swahili alive; to speak it, read it, and write it in every aspect of their lives. On the daladala, while I read stories about people in Ireland or Japan, my neighbours were engrossed in a book written in Swahili and set in Tanzania. It got me thinking about what I was reading and writing; of what it would mean for me and my people to read stories set in places they recognised, so I set off on a search for African authors other than those documented by the African Writer’ Series.
One day I picked up a book titled The Will To Die by an author I’d never heard of. His name was Can Themba. I read the blurb as usual then made up my mind to buy it once I’d read the introduction. It was a sad remembrance of a dead friend filled with bitterness and regret, written by yet another author I’d never heard of, Lewis Nkosi. I was intrigued. I wanted to read for myself the cause of this sadness. I was struggling daily with the conflict between what I saw as my duty to write and the reality of surviving life so I bought the book already rankled. I was unprepared for the hornet’s nest it upset.
I read The Will To Die in one sitting. I was gripped by the stories Can Themba told but Nkosi’s words were always at the back of my mind;
‘Can Themba’s actual achievements are more disappointing because his learning and reading were more substantial and his talent proven; but he chose to confine his brilliance to journalism of an insubstantial kind. It is almost certain that had Can Themba chosen to write a book on South Africa, it would not only have been an interesting, or to use an American word ‘insightful’ book, but it might have revealed a complex and refined talent for verbalising the African mood. And no doubt, such a book would have been a valuable addition to the literature of South Africa. As it is, we mourn a talent largely misused or neglected; we mourn what might have been. But to have known a mind both vigorous and informed, shaped by the city as few other minds are in the rest of Africa….’
Nkosi’s words stirred my insides in places I wanted to ignore. Can’s writing had captivated me and the smallness of the book did not sate my intrigue. I shut the book with aching confusion filling my insides. The stories, the way they unfolded, the language Themba used; it read like a thunderstorm building long and hard, rumbling and threatening,then a flash of light right before the thunderclap, only to move on quietly a few seconds later. Can Themba’s talent for drawing the drama out of his characters was evident, but the stories tended to peter out without a real look at the why,as if to say this is the way things are. But there is silence on why they are that way. I wanted more. He should have given us more!
I found myself reluctantly agreeing with Nkosi.
The title The Will To Die, taken from one of the stories in the book, is a sad picture of the underlying tone of the book. There is much to laugh at in the stories but it is a bitter sound. The collection paints the portrait of a man living in so much pain-a pain that must have been what was broiling in his system when he wrote in Bottom Of The Bottle,
“As I brood over these things, I, with my insouciant attitude to matters of weight, I feel a sickly despair which the most potent bottle of brandy cannot wash away. What can I do?”
Laughter and drink seem the only recourse for survival.
Can Themba’s candid and vivid language shows his talent clearly.You can see why Nkosi views his life as an example of the waste that became the talent South Africa had at the time. His obituary decries what Nkosi sees as Can’s neglect: that for a man who was gifted beyond thousands of the average people to confine himself to that chosen style of writing was a waste. But it wasn’t just Can’s legacy that Lewis Nkosi was concerned about. It was their generation as a collective.
Nkosi felt that he and his friends, the ‘Drum Boys’, as they called themselves, were in a unique position to add insightful writing to South Africa’s reading pool. They believed it so much they documented their lives in the stories they investigated and wrote for Drum Magazine. Some contemporaries like Nat Nakosa committed suicide– no one knows why– and though Can Themba himself did not commit suicide, his lifestyle seems to have been one long suicide letter. I suppose it was the despair and lack of purpose, or perhaps the failure and regret binding their lives. The stories he told centred on the day to day life he lived. No forward thinking. That is Nkosi’s bitterness. How then shall people remember Can Themba? How shall they remember the ‘Drum Boys’?
The preservation of the written word takes on a form of the sacred for readers. So I can understand why Nkosi regrets what could have been with such great potential. We all know the effect greatness can have for a people and a time, especially when put on paper, and the kind of change it can bring about. Words have a profound effect on the soul. It doesn’t matter when, or why, or whom: when the right words leap from a page into your heart, your world tilts a little or a lot. Nothing is the same again.
My own life is an example of their power to modify social behaviour. My earliest childhood memories are of being up to all sorts of mischief and receiving daily beatings for it. Then the love of reading took hold of me and instead of making trouble all over the place, I was sitting at window sills at break time in school, absorbed in C.S Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, or Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five. The more I read, the more I knew. The more I knew, the cleverer I became. The cleverer I was, the more attention I got at home and at school. The more attention I had, the more powerful I felt. People paid attention when I spoke. I directed my life. My future was bright and wonderful. I could be anything I wanted.
As a female child born to a struggling middle class family with a hive of relatives and siblings vying for attention, attention was a commodity well worth working for. It no longer mattered that I wasn’t a boy. I was better than the boys and that was important. I knew where the Arctic Circle was. I knew about the Mongols, the Aborigines and the Egyptians. I knew about Isaza and Kabalega. I knew about whales and tigers and dinosaurs; deep sea diving, sky diving, and bungee jumping. I knew about cars and guns and dying, about sex, love, and having babies. I knew all this because I read. It changed the way I dealt with the world around me. Make believe was full of the adventure life lacked. Only once the book was over, there were still unanswered parts of the stories. I finished them in my head till they became so numerous I had to write them down to keep sane. There the cycle began. I read for adventure, I wrote for therapy.
I suppose this is what Nkosi is referring to when he says Can Themba could have changed the outlook of South Africans had he applied his talents to writing a novel. Maybe Nkosi’s disappointment is not that Can Themba did not apply his brilliance, but that he did not produce to the level his brilliance suggested. The more I desired from Can, the more his friend’s introduction rankled. My insides were screaming:Why should we vilify whosoever chooses that the present is more important than the future or the past? Who was he to make such a declaration on Can’s life and work?How could he know what it took Themba to produce what he did?How could he be so dismissive of what Can Themba had already done in favour of what he didn’t do?
The arguments tumbled on and on until my mirror asked me who I was really defending- Can Themba or myself? My reply was that it didn’t matter. Someone has to remind the world that writers are only people after all. They are plagued with the same afflictions the rest of the world suffers. Talent is certainly incredible but it is not the only ingredient in a great piece of work. Life is different for every individual. Each must make their own choices. The times we live in influence the things that we write. One’s life experience; their abilities, character, and circumstances of upbringing, create the limits within which we achieve or not.
Can Themba did not choose to be born in apartheid South Africa, but he was: and that imposed limitations that influenced his life. Some choices were made by himself and some by the circumstances he found himself in. His experience created the very despair you could say hindered his abilities.
There is this schism between our desire for better,for greatness even, and the helplessness we feel at our inability to achieve it. It creates an imbalance in the way we function. You pile pressure on yourself that makes you impotent; forgetting that every person must walk the way that is right for them; that life to have any form of meaning must go by the choices you make.
I argue that it’s really our ego; our insatiable desire to elevate our ego. It is our desire for remembrance; to be told and to hold that we have contributed to the way life is. We want to influence what people will think of us- that is our desire whether we admit or not. And for many of us who write it is bigger than most. Writing is a form of stamping- ‘I was here’, ‘Hear me’, ‘Do not forget me’. We write, we draw, we postulate, we philosophise, iterate, expound; we stamp, we build, we procreate, we name, chasing immortality with a fervour we are often too afraid to admit.
Therefore when we meet a life that seems to waste its talents on the more pressing matter of surviving life, we cry foul for it is a conversation our mortality avoids. In our determined rejection of mortality we chase immortality with a fervour egged on by the empty histories of our collective past. Perhaps this is the immortality that Nkosi sought for his friend in compiling The Will to Die. Maybe he was trying to write the autobiography his friend never bothered to do write. Maybe that was his way of resolving his mind with his friend’s death, and in publishing it desired that people would remember the least of what Can Themba was able to do.
In a world brought to our doorsteps by the google king, we moan our lack of immortal past. Our true histories are forever lost in the strangling old ways of life quickly consumed by a changing world. So in the face of a past greatly unknown, we hurry to immortalise our present. Our children, our children, we cry; they must know the truth.
Whose truth?
Isn’t truth bound in the cyclone of human nature? Even now we sift through the legacies of those long dead, dismembering each in search of the ‘real’ truth–that core which gives meaning to our version of truth. Will our children sift, dismember, categorise, and re-name our truth too?May be Can’s wife saw things a different way. May be when Nkosi thought Themba could have done more his wife thought he did so much; that under the circumstances what he left us should be celebrated and not mourned.
What Can Themba and his friends did with the African Drum series wasn’t just writing. It was camaraderie.Something happens when people collect and put it down to a simple enough thing as, “we have an edition coming out next month, write.”A similar group in England had a different ending. The Inklings, as they called themselves, produced J.R.R Tolkien’s and C.S Lewis’ well-loved works over a period of twenty years. Would they have done it without their camaraderie forcing them to be better, to produce more, who knows?
Writing and reading is about community; enjoining the individual drive with the group purpose. This is what groups like Femrite and The Lantern Meet endeavour to do in Kampala. To live to write is to live to be read: if the people you write for cannot read your work what then is the point of bearing the continued frustration in producing written work?
As a writer I want to write well and prolifically– but if I don’t, I want my life as whole to be enough. When I go about the daily pickings of my life, saturated with the distractions of being a mother and a career woman, I’d rather see them as a concerted effort to find balance for today. Should I be able to tell today’s story with my colour of truth, let it be enough. Should I end my day simply revelling in the life I am given, let it be enough. Let it be that today, just today is enough.
Maybe tomorrow, with a little camaraderie, our todays will paint a perfect picture of yesterday.
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