Sickness at noon as South Africa’s ‘time is running out very quickly ...

Press, 30 August 1986, Page 21

Sickness at noon as South Africa’s ‘time is running out very quickly ...

Wilbur Smith is the most popular writer South Africa has ever produced and one of the world’s best sellers. But it’s today’s headlines that are shaping tomorrow’s block-buster as JOHN EZARD of the London ‘Guardian’ found out.

“Again, a Great Pounding of the Nations is taking place,” Wilbur Smith says. “The first Great Pounding threw the whole of black southern Africa into turmoil. The second might disperse the whites. “But the thing is that a good many of them have nowhere to go now, and you have to remember that white South Africa is a nuclear power. I think we are talking about Armageddon if anyone tries to make it happen too fast.”

Smith, the most popular writer white South Africa has produced, was talking about the subcontinent’s last great historical cataclysm, the Mfecane. Translated either as “pounding” or “crushing,” the Zulu word describes the huge chain reaction of intertribal slaughter and migrations precipitated in the early 1800 s by the conquests of Chaka, the chief who set up an empire that lasted 50 years until the British broke it.

The first Mfecane shattered old tribal territorial patterns and killed two million people. Smith

reflected on the prospect of the second, in a suite at the Dorchester during a short holiday in London, quoted a line which in his latest bestselling hardback, “Power Of The Sword,” he puts into the mouth of General Smuts, his country’s last pre-apartheid leader:

"In South Africa, a man can be filled with hope at dawn and sick with despair by noon.” In the same book he writes, as he has done in almost all his previous 18 bestsellers, of the “unfathomable void which separates the races in Africa,” in which “all the gross ills of the human condition flourished as in a hothouse, exaggerated until they were almost a caricature of evil.”

Smith is among the world’s top ten-selling fiction writers: he has equalled lan Fleming’s record of seven million sellers. A pattern of blood-and-thunder-with-be-nign-sex beats dependably through his adventure plots — but beneath this, he has a better sense of place and history than any rival except Stephen King.

’On his own territory, he has sustained those two gifts more doggedly by research and bushtrekking than anyone since John Buchan. A sense of place, in particular, is a magical strength for any writer whose theme is Africa.

“Power Of The Sword” is the second book in the third of a series of interlocking trilogies written over 20 years. They cover South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, and span their politics from the days of Livingstone through the Zulu, Matabele, and Boer wars, to the election of Daniel Malan’s first apartheid government in 1948. “The Burning Shore” (just out in paperback) is the first in the latest trilogy. The third, due for delivery to his publisher in October, will take the 180-year story up to tomorrow’s newspaper headlines, whatever these may be.

“I know this is a very dangerous thing to do,” he says. “It might trouble a lot of my readers. It is going to be a very precise, tremendously challenging exercise to try to sum it all up.”

His overriding themes, on a scale of output already 11 times longer than “Gone With The Wind,” are the colonial drive for wealth, the poisoning time and time again of the wells of interracial friendship, the despoliation of the bush, and the genocide by both black and white of

its Stone Age bush peoples. In 1978, “A Sparrow Falls,” the third novel of his first trilogy and one of his million-sellers, was banned in South Africa apparently because it showed the old Boer War hero, General Smuts, worrying, as long ago as the 19205, about eventual apocalypse. Eight years ago, Smith said in a “Guardian” interview: “If there’s time, it’s running out very quickly. Gee, when I was a young man I thought 100 years. Ten years ago, I thought there was 20 years. Now I think it’s much less. I think in the next five years there must be drastic changes — before that, if you are going to hold the whole thing together.”

‘ln South Africa we can be filled with hope at dawn and sick with despair at noon’

Now, in “Power Of The Sword,” he includes a sympathetic sketch of the young Nelson Mandela and a contempt-filled profile of the young Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, who was later to be apartheid’s greatest prime ministerial consolidator and apologist, as a pre-war evangelist, for the

ideology of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The hero of the story says of the 1948 election’s handover of the sword to Boer fundamentalists: “I feel as if I’m on a runaway train, heading into a long dark tunnel — no means of escape, no way of stopping it.” Smith himself does not now feel quite so apocalyptic, because of the reforms introduced since that last interview. “Ninety-five per cent of the structure of apartheid has been demolished,” he says. A tiny mark of this is that, despite the state of emergency and the censor’s still draconian powers, neither of the first two books of his latest trilogy has been banned. Neither has anyone asked him to apologise for his picture of an assassinated hero to whom statues are still being put up by some Afrikaners. "Verwoerd was probably the most evil man in southern African history," he adds. “More evil than Chaka because Chaka was not doing anything consciously. He was just killing people who got in his way. “My feelings about South Africa are so ambivalent. I’m aware as well as anyone else in the world that we have had 40 years under the Nationalists of the most grotesque misgovernment of any country in the world. But on the other hand it’s still a magnificent country and (President) P. W. Botha is far and away the most liberal and

reformist South African leader in 300 years. We are talking about a man prepared to hand over a great deal of the accumulated power and privilege of whites.’’ Smith is a long-standing supporter of Helen Suzman’s Leftwing white Progressive Federal Party. Therefore, he opposes sanctions, at least until negotiations for a transfer of power have been tried with the precondition of a truce by the African National Congress. He hopes for a government under Chief Buthulezi as the best way of “holding the thing together” without devastating resources. He sees “capitulation” to the A.N.C., with its present make-up, as the rapid road to an intimidated election followed by a one-party Marxist state: “one man, one vote, but once only.” “Under the strictest, tightest sanctions, South Africa can chug along for a good many years where most of the front-line states won’t last much longer than a couple of months. I do believe a beleaguered Nationalist government — possibly a generals’ junta if Botha is pushed too hard into concessions his people will not tolerate — has it within itself to draw out the whole business for much longer than anyone believes. And, in the end to pull down the temple.” By that he means an Afrikaans Gotterdammerung, dynamiting the gold and diamond mines or poisoning them with radioactiv-

ity; sowing the country figuratively with salt; and using nuclear weapons against military attack or the naval blockade demanded by Denis Healey, the British Labour Party deputy leader; a last, suicidal Mfecane beyond . the imaginings of Verwoerd and Chaka. Recently, he watched with his wife Daniel’s black maid in Suguletu township, near Cape Town, while the "young comrades” made a black neighbour in her fifties'eat a full two-kilogramme

packet of washing powder, “an experience she did not survive.” She had bought it at a white store during an A.N.C. boycott. “Things are happening that cause immense distress," Smith says, “but in a perverse sort of way it’s also enormously stimulating and exciting. For a writer, there’s just so much happening. “And I’m sure there’s going to be no neat solution. It’s impossible. My gut feeling is that it’s going to be a long, messy business.” ,