Christopher Hope

(C) Jennifer Zumbusch

Speech on exile by patron Christopher Hope

On the occasion of the opening event of the Days of Exile Bonn, on 30 August 2024 at the LVR-Landesmuseum Bonn.

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Rede zum Exil von Christopher Hope

The full speech on exile

If there is a word in an exile’s vocabulary that stands as a guiding star, it is the word ‘home’.

Home is where you come from but it is also what you have lost. It is the exile’s hole in the heart. But the longer, and the further, you live away from home, the harder it is to say what home means. My own home country, South Africa, in the old days of apartheid was a very strange location, a place where very many South Africans were never truly ‘at home.’ The old South Africa was a fiction, invented by the white-led nationalist government, as a politically convenient deception. A deception of others, yes, but also, for the old regime, it was a way of deceiving itself.

The greater part of the inhabitants of my country, in those years, were not allowed to call themselves South Africans. That privilege was for the few and it was granted if you were white but not black or brown or any shade in between. Many people then were exiles in their own country. Even the definition of who was, and was not, ‘white’, was a complicated procedure. After I left South Africa and had been living for many years in faraway countries, someone asked me if I was homesick and I had to say that I felt no more homesick in a foreign country than I did when I lived in South Africa. I was homesick long before I left home.

When I was young, I had the feeling that South Africa was created by a particularly cruel novelist with a very dark sense of humour. I came later to see that there was no distant creator of the country we lived in. We were ourselves the authors of this crazy novel we called a country. A society that had taken leave of it senses. White people in South Africa wilfully blinded themselves to black Africans living all around them. They were shadows from some other shadowy world, if we saw them at all.

I began quite early to write in poems and stories about our maniacal obsession with skin colour and our easy acceptance of violence. South Africa, under the old apartheid regime, was a place of casual, consistent, unending brutality, much of which passed for normality. The same thing, I must tell you, may be said of South Africa today, in its new, more democratic, formulation. There are few places, outside the worst war zones, where so many people are killed with so little compunction.

But what tore my country apart was skin colour, its melanin madness.

I will give you an example. One day, when I was about nine years old, I was crossing a railway bridge to find, as I reached the other side, the angry station master was waiting for me. ‘What colour are you?’ he wanted to know. ‘White, I answered. ‘Not any more, you’re black now,’ he said. He pointed to the sign on the railway bridge I had crossed. It read ‘Non-Whites Only.’ Next, he pointed to a second, parallel bridge, some distance away. ‘If you want to turn white again, go back across the wrong bridge and cross by the white bridge.’ And very naturally, I did as I was ordered. You see, that sort of thing was perfectly normal.

The question for a writer under apartheid, was: what is to be done? We had good writers who pointed out the brutality of those who made the rules and ran the country. But I concentrated on the absurdity embedded in such brutality, and I wanted to expose the dark comedy woven within our insane, quasi-religious obsession with skin colour. My models were writers like Jonathan Swift, Voltaire and, later on, exiles like James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Roth. My question to myself was: how can I picture the perverse universe I find myself in? Gradually, I realised that any very bad, very stupid tragedy will include moments of outrageous comedy bordering on farce. Anyone who has lived in a police state will know this. Those who rule over you may also be frighteningly funny – so long as you don’t die laughing.

When I began picturing my country in poems and stories, in the 1960’s and 70’s, those who invented the essential racial absurdities that governed everyday life, were not amused. The era of apartheid in South Africa was, or so we thought at the time, the ultimate age of the censor, the age of house arrest, banishment, jail terms, exile; a time when the banning of books, and people, was common.

There were paradoxes to deal with. The white Nationalist regime on the briefest examination, was very evidently a gang of racist desperadoes, whose barbarism was exceeded only by their stupidity. But though the regime was all-powerful, it was also very sensitive. And it paid to writers the ultimate compliment of taking their books seriously. I knew young poets who found more readers amongst the censors than among the general public. Our censors were formed into what was called a publications board, not with the aim of publishing anything but in order to suppress books deemed to be dangerous.

Poems were banned, advertisements, as well as everything from packaging for women’s nylon stockings, films, plays and, of course, lots of people. You could be banned or placed under house arrest for what you said or read or wrote or believed. Our list of banned works was rivalled only by the list kept in the Vatican. A title alone was enough to cause trouble. Martin Buber’s theological treatise, Between Man and Man, was banned because, so the ridiculous rumour whispered, it might be a gay treatise. However, you could not say how ridiculous it all was. To do so was an offense, and I quote: ‘to insult, disparage or belittle’ our censors. Believe it or not, the apartheid regime tried to ban laughter.

In the 1960’s, I started a small literary magazine called Bolt. I published poems and stories by black, white and brown writers who lived in townships such as Soweto, outside Johannesburg, as well as work by exiled South Africans living abroad and a few celebrated African poets, like Leopold Senghor of Senegal. This racially rich literature was unpleasant to apartheid ideologues, obsessed with ethnic and tribal purity. The usual surveillance began, letter opening, snooping and phone tapping. Because I was white, the reaction of the authorities was far less unpleasant than the pressure on black writers. We had lost a generation of remarkable young black writers in the 1950’s and 1960’s, lost them to exile, depression and despair.

One of these exiles was Nat Nakasa, a near contemporary from my home city of Johannesburg. He fell to his death from a high window in New York, in 1965. A few years ago, I had the lucky chance of commemorating his exile, in a play with music, commissioned by Carnegie Hall. It is said that Nakasa died of depression. But I think homesickness killed him. Joseph Roth, a writer who knew about exile, wrote of returning soldiers from the First World War battlefields: ‘a great homesickness emanates from them, a longing which drives them onward, the overwhelming memory of home.’

In the 1970’s, I had a further brush with the South African censors when they banned the radio broadcast of my satirical soliloquy, called Kobus Le Grange Marais. The speaker in the poem, an old, disabled railway worker, sits on a bar stool in Pretoria and complains bitterly about Blacks, Jews, English liberals and even Afrikaners, who ruin his life by failing to obey the requirements of apartheid, total racial segregation from birth to burial. We had no television; that was one more thing the regime banned. Radio was the vital medium for getting your views heard around the country. But my comic poem overstepped the bounds of propriety and was condemned to the usual oblivion. This made me restless. I was young and wanted to see something of what we referred to, in those faraway days, as ‘the outside world.’ And so, in 1975, I applied for a passport. That was a mistake because, as a result, I lost it and have been applying for its return without success, for close on fifty years.

The apartheid regime regarded a passport as a privilege and not a right and my application in 1975 was refused. Luckily, my grandfather’s Irish background made Irish citizenship possible. But I was officially notified by a government minister that I would lose my South African citizenship if I chose to use a foreign passport. However, I might be granted a South African passport but it came with a condition. Once I left South Africa, I would not be allowed to return without special permission.

So I set off for London on my South African passport, carrying what was known as an ‘exit permit’. I took Irish citizenship anyway, and I have travelled as an Irish national ever since. I am very grateful for this gift but there is something absurd about it. As anyone reading my books will know, I am a South African, my family goes back several generations and the older I get, the more South African I seem to become.

In London in the 1970’s, ironically enough, I found myself not that far from home.

Because London was where many South African exiles waited and watched and hoped. I lived not far from Oliver Tambo, who led the ANC in exile when Mandela was still in jail. Several of these exiles would one day come home and run the new South Africa. I did not always agree with ANC exiles who preached Black nationalism. I saw it not as an ideology but as an illness. Like white nationalism. But the best of the exiles I knew believed, above all, that if ever a new, democratic South Africa came to be, we would never again succumb to the mindless obsession with race, skin colour and ethnic blood lines that doomed the old South Africa. That belief has proved to be an illusion.

It was while I lived in London, in the late 1970’s, that my first novel, A Separate Development, was published in South Africa. The title is one of the euphemisms the regime used instead of ‘apartheid’. The novel is a comic tale about a boy who is never sure what colour he really is. Or is supposed to be. The sort of boy who crosses over the wrong railway bridge and turns black. My novel was banned almost immediately in South Africa, all copies were removed from the bookshops and it became an offence to read it. I knew then that my stay in exile would not be a short one.

My next novel, Kruger’s Alp, another satire, based on the classic tale of Pilgrim’s Progress, appeared in the 1980’s. It was not banned in South Africa but people who owned it found that the Security Police, the equivalent in apartheid South Africa of the Stasi in East Germany, warned readers to get rid of it. In the 1980’s I began travelling to various repressive regimes. I did it because they were familiar to what I know. I travelled to Zimbabwe, the German Democratic Republic, and later to Moscow and to Serbia, during the wars that tore Yugoslavia to pieces. I spent time in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, countries slowly emerging from the long night of socialist pretensions.

I wrote about their sad, repetitive, impoverished vocabulary, and the very similar customs of repressive regimes and their apparatchiks, the limited theatrical adornments available to autocrats, the costumes from the same props department, the same actors in the same masks, destined for the same stage. The essence of autocracy is mimicry, its performances are often darkly comic. But I liked to see it close-up, perhaps because I had seen a similar theatrical performance in South Africa. Travelling to rough regimes was a way of coming home. I did not share the enthusiastic Marxism of some of my fellow exiles in London for some of these regimes.

By the later 1980’s, the old South African regime began to realise that poets and painters and novelists were not about to start the revolution. I found myself commissioned by British and other foreign newspapers, to write about South African people and politics and to report on the ending of apartheid, for an audience abroad. I was given special permission to return home but as a visitor, not as a citizen and the length of the visit was limited. I carried always a piece of paper confirming I was a South African, travelling on an Irish passport and stating the period I was permitted to remain. This led to some strange experiences of mistaken identity. I was once complimented on my Afrikaans, a language I have spoken since childhood. ‘How is it that an Irishman speaks our language? ’I was asked, ‘We will send a translator with you anyway, just in case you don’t understand what is going on.‘

In the 1990’s, Nelson Mandela was released from jail.

Change was in the air. I applied, unsuccessfully once again, to have my citizenship restored. Mandela supported free speech over censorship. In a speech in 1994, he declared: „No single person, no body of opinion, no political or religious doctrine, no political party or government can claim to have a monopoly on truth.’

Around the same time as that ringing endorsement of free speech, I published in a British paper, a portrait of my hometown, Johannesburg, pointing out that the appetite for violence in South Africa was as bad as ever. Anyone who knew Johannesburg would recognise the truth of that immediately. I was condemned by newly arrived ANC diplomats in London as a pessimistic, unpatriotic and un-South African observer. It was so like old times that I felt homesick all over again.

Not long after Mandela was elected president, a popular South African singer in Cape Town set to music my little poem of many years earlier, Kobus Le Grange Marais. He was unwise enough to include it on his new CD and it was promptly banned once again. But this time it was banned by ANC apparatchiks, who now controlled the national broadcaster. And for the same reasons that the old apartheid apparatchiks suppressed the poem twenty-five years earlier. How did I feel, someone asked me, to have my word suppressed in both the old – and the new South Africa? Quite nostalgic, actually.

South Africa today has parted company from Mandela’s affirmation of the primacy of free speech. On December 6, 2023, the ANC government signed into law what it called ‘the Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill.’ That’s quite a mouthful, is it not? Critics have pointed out that the new law condemns not hate speech but speech that certain people find hateful. A very different matter. As a result, you may be prosecuted in South Africa today, and I quote, ‘for mocking the concept, events or victims of hate crimes, even if no real person is depicted in an image or in the words you write.’

South African journalists have been verbally and physically assaulted by politicians who object to their gender, race and to their reporting. They have been sexually harassed, labelled Satanistic, reviled and abused. I know that such attacks on free speech are not confined to South Africa, they are familiar around the world. The essential difference today is that these attacks often come from those who once opposed the banning of books and supported the freedom to say what you thought and believed.

To misquote, very slightly, the poet Heine’s fearful prophecy on book burners: it might be said that those who ban books, sooner or later, will also ban people. South Africa is a classic example. The urge to control what people say and think goes hand in hand with a growing hatred of refugees and exiles, many of whom came to the country, after the end of apartheid. Some are economic migrants, others are political exiles and often no-one can tell the difference. Zimbabweans, Rwandans, Kenyans, Malawians and Congolese are the easy prey , hunted down by gangs of uniformed thugs, who demand that these interlopers ‘go home’. Over the past ten years, my old university of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, has counted the fatal costs of this violent xenophobia. The number of those killed runs into hundreds; several thousand shops and businesses owned by expatriates have been looted; over a hundred thousand people have been chased from their homes. New political parties have as their only policy the expulsion of foreigners.

In a further measure, the South African government has removed asylum status from political exiles.

If you take part in any political activity related to your home country, you can be sent ‘home’, a word that strikes fear into African exiles sheltering in South Africa. Exiles often from nations that themselves gave refuge to our own exiles, during the apartheid years. There is no end to the Kafkaesque ironies of South Africa.

I am asked sometimes why I do not return to live in South Africa. Of course, I yearn for home. What exile does not? There is hardly a day when I do not ask myself that question. But I can only do so as a tourist. I have been unable to reclaim my citizenship, despite many attempts to do so. I know this long denial is not personal, it is part of the indifference, corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude of most government departments in South Africa.

The ANC government has been in uninterrupted political power in South Africa for thirty years. Its achievements are few and the overall feeling in the country has been close to despair. In a recent book, The Cafe de Move-On Blues, I chart the decline of the core belief in non-racialism, regarded as sacred by the ANC in exile. Today, race is again the measure of everything. I write about this and I am not very surprised when it is not popular.

In the general election held earlier this year, the ruling ANC was rejected by huge numbers of voters and very many of its traditional supporters. And rightly so. It ran an election campaign in which over-paid party functionaries raced through dirt-poor black settlements, tossing T-shirts, embossed with party slogans, from the windows of their bullet-proof limousines. That was our Marie Antoinette moment. If the poor have no jobs, food or shelter, then let them have T-shirts…

And so, I wait. But I also see why it has been good to keep my distance. Exile offers a long view and sometimes a clear view of a very complicated homeland. I take comfort from a remark by that writer-prince of exiles, Vladimir Nabokov, who never returned to Russia. ‘I would not exchange,’ he wrote, ‘the liberty of my exile, for the vile parody of home.’

I am very grateful for this chance to air my thoughts and feelings on my half- century of expatriation. This Days of Exile gathering, here in Bonn, is imaginative, consoling and very necessary. It is consoling because it recognises that hole in the heart every exile knows, and knows all too well. And it is necessary because it draws attention to the unending exile of so many, who find themselves so far from home. Thank you very much.

Christopher Hope