Literature Review
On 24 February 2017, South African novelist Miriam Tlali died at the age of 83 in Doornfontein, Johannesburg. She was a visiting fellow of the African Studies Centre in 1984. While she was staying in Leiden, she worked on a novel and a short story collection.
Miriam Masoli Tlali was born in Doornfontein in 1933 and grew up in Sophiatown. She attended St Cyprian’s Anglican School and then Madibane High School. She studied at the University of the Witwatersrand until it was closed to Blacks during the apartheid era; she later went to the National University of Lesotho (then called Pius the XII University) at Roma, Lesotho. Leaving there because of lack of funds, she went to secretarial school and found employment as a bookkeeper at a Johannesburg furniture store.
Tlali drew on her experiences as an office clerk for her first book, Muriel at Metropolitan, a semi-autobiographical novel. Although written in 1969, it was not published for six years, being rejected by many publishing houses in South Africa. In 1975 Ravan Press published Muriel at Metropolitan: ‘only after removing certain extracts they thought would certainly offend the Censorship Board — the South African literary watchdog. But despite this effort, the novel was banned almost immediately after publication because the Censorship Board pronounced it undesirable in the South African political context’. The book reached a wider audience after its publication in 1979 by Longman under the title Between Two Worlds, and its subsequent translation into other languages, including Japanese, Polish, German and Dutch.
Her second novel, Amandla, which was based on the 1976 Soweto uprising, was also banned in South Africa soon after it was published in 1980. Later books by Tlali include Mihloti (meaning ‘Tears’), a collection of short stories, interviews and non-fiction, published in 1984 by the black publishing house Skotaville, which she co-founded. Her novels were unbanned in 1986. Her 1989 book Footprints in the Quag, published in South Africa by David Philip, was brought out under the title Soweto Stories by Pandora Press.
Tlali co-founded and contributed to Staffrider magazine, for which she wrote a regular column, ‘Soweto Speaking’, as well as writing for other South African publications, including the Rand Daily Mail.
Tlali received numerous awards during her lifetime, most notably, the Presidential Award, the Order of Ikhamanga (Silver) in 2008, as well as a lifetime achievement award from the South African Literary Awards.
https://www.ascleiden.nl/content/library-weekly/miriam-tlali
third in a weekly arts and culture series called “Under the influence”. Barbara Boswell introduces Miriam Tlali’s novel “Amandla”.
South African novelist Miriam Tlali’s “Amandla” is one of a handful of Black Consciousness novels that renders in fiction the June 1976 Soweto uprising.
Published in 1980 by Ravan Press, it was only the second novel authored in English by a black woman to be published within the borders of apartheid South Africa (her 1975 debut, “Muriel at Metropolitan” was the first). Predictably, “Amandla” was banned upon publication.
“Amandla” offers a richly detailed fictional account of the 1976 Soweto uprising, when the township’s youth rose up against the decision to make Afrikaans compulsory as a medium of instruction in black schools. “Amandla” is written from the perspective of a number of young revolutionaries of the time.
Based on Tlali’s experience as a Soweto resident in 1976, the novel depicts the uprising and its aftermath. It vividly sketches the mechanics of the Black Consciousness ideology in the service of anti-apartheid activism. “Amandla” does so while teasing apart gender relations between men and women activists, and within the larger community.
It is one of four novels considered “Soweto novels”, works of fiction depicting the June 1976 uprising. The others are Mongane Serote’s “To Every Birth its Blood” (1981), Sipho Sepamla’s “A Ride on the Whirlwind” (1981) and Mbulelo Mzamane’s “The Children of Soweto” (1982).
These novels are heavily influenced by Black Consciousness ideology. They are also shaped by Steve Biko’s writings on a unified black populace that would decolonise itself from racist indoctrination.
However, “Amandla” departs from these novels in an unprecedented attentiveness to the gender politics of the day. It engages in the mimetic work of reflecting black gender relations in Soweto. The novel also constructs a new vision of black masculinity.
Why is/was it influential?
Tlali uses Black Consciousness discourse as a launching point for this vision of masculinity. The novel tracks the life of the student leader, Pholoso, and a range of minor characters.
The reader follows Pholoso as he becomes a leader of the youth. In this role he has conscientising sessions in the cellar of a church with young people active in the struggle. Here Tlali allows him long streams of dialogue. He outlines several position statements from the underground resistance movement on how society should be organised.
Relationships between black men and women is one area where he “instructs” the youth on ethical behaviour. In one scene, Pholoso addresses a room of 22 activists as “Ma-Gents”, making it clear that the room is filled with young men. Within this masculinised space, Pholoso articulates, among other things, a strong position on gender equality and relationships with women.
First, he addresses the absence of women from the “innermost core” of the underground movement this gathering represents. He attributes women’s absence to the high levels of sexual harassment to which women are subject whenever they move around Soweto.
Pholoso names this scourge of molestation as an impediment to women’s participation in political activity. He believes it should be countered through educating the public at large.
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In addressing the “Ma-Gents” on the sexual harassment, treatment and education of women, Pholoso advocates an oppositional black masculinity to counter dominant iterations of masculinity in Soweto. He exhorts the men to “go out and educate the people”. Pholoso is reliant on a ripple effect his message will have as it spreads out in concentric circles among the township’s men.
It is important to note that he is not addressing white men or women and their treatment of black women, but black men specifically. A black man himself, he holds black men as a group accountable for the safety, education and equitable treatment of women. He is gesturing to a time as yet unknown, in the future, when black subjects will be free of the oppression of apartheid.
Pholoso infers that women will not only be instrumental in fighting for this new, racially equitable social order. Black men also need to prepare for this time of freedom by ensuring that women and men are fully prepared and able to partake in its fruits.
In “Amandla”, Tlali thus negotiates Black Consciousness ideology by producing a critique of apartheid rooted in Black Consciousness. Simultaneously she complicates the discourse by showing the gendered experiences of sexual harassment that are singular to black women during the 1976 uprising.
“Amandla” provides a rich historical rendering of one of the turning points in the anti-apartheid struggle. It also gives an insightful analysis of the gender politics of the time. Given this content and context, the novel has great potential to contribute to contemporary discussions of violence against women, especially within national student movements.
Disagreements about the role of gender and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and questioning (LGBTIQ) students’ role within the most recent student protests seems to have split the movement. Tlali’s novel provides an instructive critique of the gender politics of Black Consciousness, an ideology that has been forcefully reasserted in these most recent protests.
With its strong position on gender relations within Black Consciousness organising, “Amandla” is worth revisiting by student activists seeking to negotiate an ethical path between economic, racial and gender equity demands. Its didactic aims, instead of being dismissed as aesthetically unappealing, could be well utilised in reframing, for young men in particular, the historical events of the 1976 uprising. It could also be a blueprint for avoiding a repeat of the mistakes then made regarding women’s participation in political movements.
Amandla and the question of writing (fiction) The novel Amandla (1986)7 by Miriam Tlali documents the history o f the 1976 Soweto rebellion and its culmination in detention and exile. It portrays, rather than mass action, more or less individual pockets o f resistance. The text presents action which is defeated rather than victorious, and yet it presents itself explicitly as a novel o f struggle against apartheid. This message is conveyed explicitly enough through codes not usually taken to be part of the text itself. The cover o f Amandla has been commented upon by Alvarez-Pereyre (1988:115-116): Before even opening the book the reader is confronted with the theme of power – and with the attempt to instal an alternative power. ‘Amandla’, the title proclaims across the top of the red cover, while beneath it a black fist is shown raised against barbed wire. In Zulu the word ‘amandla’ means ‘power’, and it is the first of two terms chanted by demonstrators against white power, ‘Amandla Ngawethu!’ – ‘Power is ours!’ or, ‘Power belongs to us!’ A title therefore which is at once a programme and a challenge. At the same time, Amandla presents itself as a fictionalization (the subtitle is ‘A Novel by Miriam Tlali’) of history (the text is dedicated not only to Tlali’s husband and children, but “to the courageous children o f Soweto who laid down their lives during June 1976 so that a free Azania may be realised”). Amandla records this attempt at realising ‘a free A zania’. It does not portray success as much as the dialectic of desire and defeat between an ideal and a reality. This dialectic is manifested in a significant way within the text as something which is itself perceived not to be physical, objective reality. The first chapter o f the text (Amandla A-S) functions as a kind o f prol The first chapter o f the text (Amandla A-S) functions as a kind o f prologue to the novel. The beginning o f the novel is situated before the start o f Soweto 1976: it 7 The novel was first published in 1980, but was banned on publication until 1985. 116 is “Monday the 29th of April, 1975” (Amandla:\), more than a year before Soweto 1976. The protagonist of the novel, Pholoso, and his girlfriend, Felleng, are in the Starlite Cinema watching a film. In this ambience o f the fictionalization of history – they are on the point of watching Cecil B. de Mille’s The Ten Commandments (AmandlaA) – they are told that “Die ‘terrorists’ is hier!” [“The ‘terrorists’ are here!”] (AmandlaA)* However, Pholoso is sceptical: It could be a hoax; a false alarm. Maybe an armed black man had suddenly run amok and started shooting at random. Perhaps he had actually wounded a few whites, and, as usual, it had become a ‘white’ national disaster. He tried to reason it out, alone in his mind, in the complete darkness of the cinema. How could the poor so-called terrorists pierce the armour of the South African Defence Force – the invincible Goliath armed to the teeth; the mighty ‘white’ navy; the powerful ‘white’ air force, howl (Amandla.3). The illusory’ falseness and hopelessness of it all is intimated by references to the film: the SADF is “the invincible Goliath”, the “terrorists” could never succeed in piercing its armour. David is helpless against Goliath. Miracles do not happen in South Africa. Throughout the first chapter there are references to the improbability, the hopelessness of what is said to have happened. This is indicated by the repeated use of conditionals when referring to the ‘terrorists’. Furthermore, Pholoso thinks of “the absurdity o f such an occurrence” (Amandla:3), while apartheid is described – in terms o f the vainglorious ideas of its propagators that it is the god-given nature of reality – as a “million commandments” (Amandla: 7) and is thus metaphorically linked to the film as well. It is no accident that it is the Israeli embassy which is the focus o f the attack. Apartheid, and thus the Afrikaner State, is linked metaphorically to ancient Israel, which, in turn, is linked to the film Pholoso and Felleng are watching in the Starlite Cinema. And the ‘terrorist’ attack was, as Pholoso feared, “a hoax; a false alarm” (Amandla:3) in that it had nothing to do with that struggle. The promising prelude to what is to happen in the novel – the June 1976 insurrection – amounts to nothing. And at the end of the novel Soweto 1976 itself seems to have been “a hoax; a false alarm”. The dialectic o f fiction and reality, expectation and action, becomes grounded in the very structure o f the novel. The view postulated here is that this dialectic is the result of the uncertainty o f the text (as fictional writing) about itself with regard to its real contribution to the struggle, and that it is this dialectic which results in the disjointedness and confusion9 critics have found in Amandla. In order not to be apprehended, and if apprehended, then to hide his true identity, Pholoso “is using another name and not his real name. He did not have any identifying papers so they do not know who he is” (.Amandla A01). While in detention, Pholoso’s “mind [is] a complete blank” {Amandla: 146). He cannot remember who he is, what his name is: The fact that his mind dissolved into a complete blank when he tried to think – to remember what his name was and where he came from – was not, he decided, something that would concern him now. That would come in its own time … As Providence would have it, the very state of partial delirium and loss of memory was itself a blessing in disguise. All attempts by his assailants to establish Pholoso’s true identity and get a confession from him had been unsuccessful. They were only able to identify him by the dirty, crushed papers in his trouser pockets, which had the name Moses Masuku written on them (Amandla: 148). In order to survive, Pholoso has to stop being ‘Pholoso’. He has to mask himself by rewriting himself. This is why the elaborate scene with the codes in Chapter 12 (Amandla: 81-93) is not merely “a naïve discussion o f codes [and] invisible inks” (Watts, 1989:223) – this scene may be said to be a fictional enactment o f the novel, just as the novel is a fictional enactment o f the struggle. The activists have to hide their being by means o f language; language must act as a mask, and the revolutionaries are forced to carry out their programme, as it were, in a fictional world. The novel presents the true nature o f the programme as something which is being denied in order to carry the programme through, in the same way that Pholoso has to mask his true identity in order to protect his revolutionary programme. Pholoso’s survival depends upon Pholoso becoming Moses. Pholoso has to disguise himself, and the final disguise, the final denial of identity is located in Pholoso’s going into exile. The novel ends with Pholoso’s going into exile.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/620a/a608c0da6868b037526d3300e0aadea855e3.pdf