Every Stone Shall Cry: Indaba, My Children

It isn’t often one reads a book the writing of which put the author’s life in jeopardy, but Credo Mutwa’s book Indaba, My Children is such a book. Written in 1964, during the heyday of apartheid, Mutwa is noticeably silent on that topic. His purpose was completely other and he succeeded admirably. 

The subtitle of Indaba, My Children is “African Tribal History, Legends, Customs and Religious Beliefs.” Don’t be put off by the nearly 700 pages, just take your time. It is well worth the read. Mutwa’s first name is Vusamazulu, “Awakener of the Zulus” and he has wakened considerably more than Zulus. If his book had been more widely read and valued, one wonders how different South Africa’s history might have been.

Mutwa (his name means “bushman” in Zulu) wrote to clarify the African mind for the western world. His lineage as a Zulu witchdoctor/shaman gives him the authority, learning and insight to set before us the true and ancient accounts which were handed down orally for generations. He did this at the risk of being called a traitor to his people. 

Terrible as the stigma of traitor is, I shall risk bearing it in the belief that what I am doing here will help my people in the end. Only time will tell whether I am right or wrong. There has been much suffering and bloodshed in Africa in recent years--bloodshed that has led to hatred and still more suffering. And the most pathetic thing about it is that much of this could have been prevented had the White rulers of Africa had a better knowledge and a better understanding of the way a Black man’s mind works than they do, even now.

So the self-proclaimed Outcast describes his mission. Having memorized word for word all the ancient myths and legends, he is a consummate story-teller. His writing down has enabled historians to reconstruct the Bantu history: the alliances and enmities of tribes. His role as Guardian of Tribal History is one of protection and many felt that his revelation was betrayal.

For these reasons and many more, Indaba, My Children is a rich resource everyone living in Africa, whatever color or cultural affiliation, should read. The title is parallel to the western “once upon a time” and brings a richness of cultural description.

Many elements in subsaharan African history have been recorded in texts written by whites and their history suffers from the imbalance of their perspective. Mutwa has brilliantly explained many errors of white history which are still being taught because his book is no longer being read widely. He clarifies the truth of the story of the “slaughter” Piet Retief and explains the colossal cultural faux pas in the creation of the Kariba Dam.

For a time Credo practiced Christianity (where he picked up the name Credo) and later Islam. But it was his own African Traditional Religion which called him back and regained a native son more determined than ever to hold fast to his culture and lore. His desire to protect Africa from foreign depredations was his motivation to write. His breadth of understanding and ability to communicate across cultural boundaries is truly remarkable.

He concludes: Oh my Africa, do you see the reason why I broke my oath? I am not selling you out to strangers; I am pleading your innocence in an African Place of Justice.”

Every Stone Shall Cry: Mine Boy

Don’t let the name Peter Abrahams deceive you, his father was Ethiopian and his mother South African. He was born and grew up in South Africa, but left at the age of twenty to work first as a sailor, then a journalist.

Mine Boy, printed in 1946 (shortly before Cry, the Beloved Country) is the first recognized novel of black South Africa: the first to tell the story of the black plight under apartheid and attract international attention. 

Xuma is the hero. (Let’s pronounce his name the way he would have: the X is the click you use to make a horse hurry up. Now add “uma” after that click and you have his name.) Xuma came from the rural areas where food was scarce and jobs were scarcer to find work in iGoli, Johannesburg’s infamous gold mines. The nuance of the title is cryptic but telling. Calling Xuma “boy” would indicate to the average non-South African reader that he was young, untried, inexperienced, much as the boys aboard ship in the British Navy. But on the second page, we read a description of Xuma to set us straight.

We are seeing what the torchlight of Leah, the woman to whose house he has come for lodging, reveals: It started with the big, old tennis shoes that were kept together by bits of string and wire, and saw the toes peeping out in spite of the string and wire; moved up the dusty, colourless old trousers that were ripped at both knees and looked as though they would burst at the waist because they were so tight; up the immense chest and huge shoulders against which the equally tight and tattered shirt seemed to cling fearfully; it lingered on the broad, good-natured face for a moment; then it shifted to the right hand with its bundle and the empty left hand. The torch snapped out and Xuma waited in the darkness.

This “boy” is the protagonist. He is as innocent and guileless as the name implies and is quickly awakened to the harshness of life in Malay Camp as well as the brutalities of the mine. Abrahams chooses his words well, focusing on personalities that become friends and influences in Xuma’s life. His on-going vision is for all people to eventually see without colour. He tried to envision life without the stigma or laws connected to the superficial colour of skin. The poignancy of the struggle is deepened when he falls in love with an educated black woman who wants “white things”: books, furniture, a stove, and amenities. 

Abraham chooses to understate as he follows Xuma simple story. Simple examples: discord in the camp, a murder, discrimination and exploitation in the mines, serve as events which draw us into Xuma’s search for a colourless place where friendship happens. He has one brief experience of this utopia when his boss “the red one” invites him for a meal in his flat. Xuma begins to encounter the depth to which the enforced separation of black and white people has created a chasm beyond skin colour that will take a very long time to bridge.

But the friendship holds, despite the fickle society. When a serious accident in the mines kills some friends of Xuma, he and his white boss show solidarity by refusing to return to work before the repairs make the location safe. Paddy (his boss) shouts: “They pay you a little. They don’t care if they risk your lives! Why is it so? Is not the blood of a black man red like that of a white man? Does not a black man feel too? Does not a black man love life too? I am with you! Let them fix up the place first.”

Abrahams underplays the horror of managers and businesses not caring about the workers but insisting on appalling risks for economic gain. His focus is on the character of the person. The horror is the backdrop and leaves us cheering our hero on, knowing that for some years yet, he cannot win. But he has gained a friend--from the inside--who of necessity has chosen to be on the outside with him.

Every Stone Shall Cry: The Ink Bird

Maretha Maartens is an Afrikaans children’s author writing about the plight of Adam in The Ink Bird. It is always difficult to cross gender, color, and generational lines when writing. Maartens has done a believable job and created a character who, upon the death of his father is suddenly saddled with the support of his younger siblings and pregnant mother who births twins (Jacob and Esau) in the course of the story.

Maarten’s attempts to describe township life concentrate more on the inner fears and turmoils of a young boy, of being harassed by bullies and not being able to keep his job selling newspapers, rather than the more embittering issues of discrimination. Ink Bird, sometimes translated Paper Bird, was published in Afrikaans in 1989, during the death throes of apartheid. The English translation is adequate and the level is well suited for 9-12 year olds. She describes poverty issues very well, but lacks emphasis on the significance of the colour divide in contributing to it. Adam does not noticeably struggle with colour-based questions: but other books with children that age are wrestling with “why?” and “why us blacks?”

Life as a newspaper boy, standing at intersections to sell papers to drivers stopped for traffic  lights is chaotic and chancy. This is still part of the South African scene, but now most of the vendors are adults. The narrow economic survival margin is a good example of the extreme effort one must put out for minimal payback. Maartens does a good job illustrating the uncertainties of this tenuous existence.

The title is a metaphor using the ubiquitous newspapers which sometimes seem to take wings and fly across the road--sometimes landing on windscreens. It has powerful possibilities as an image. But Adam does not dream with it, nor imaging flying free of his township. It is a stillborn metaphor.

As a starting point to explain apartheid, this book is useful for children, but it does not go far enough. At a crucial moment in time, Adam falls ill and is taken care of by an elderly coloured vendor, who sells his papers for him and saves the money for him. This is a feel-good, “God’s in his heaven” element, almost unbelievable. Maartens does clearly speak out against the degradation of poverty, but without reminding her child readers what the ugly, invisible backdrop is. 

Every Stone Shall Cry: Down Second Avenue

Ezekiel Mphahlele (1919-2008), writer, philosopher, educator, activist, and exile is considered the Father of African Humanism. In 1977 he changed his name to Es’kia Mphahlele, so you many encounter his books with either name. His earlier autobiography (he wrote two), Down Second Avenue, is this post’s focus. But we will return to his short stories at other opportunities. His writings are especially noted as a bridge between African and Western literature.

Down Second Avenue was published in 1959, ten years after Cry, the Beloved Country, and thirty years before Kaffir Boy. His early memories of a father who beat his mother, long hours of work (he hauled laundry from white sectors for his granny to wash), and the constant fear of thugs and witchcraft corroborates the horrors which Mathabane recounts, but without the intense anger and bitterness. This may be because Mathabane was writing in his twenties and Mphahlele in his forties. His book is the more powerful for its restraint and the choice to reflect on fact rather than rely on raw emotion to communicate.

Second Avenue was where his mother took her children to live when she fled her abusive husband. Es’kia was twelve and recalls the transition from rural to slum in vivid detail, but as a learner, not a victim. He did not begin studying regularly until he was 15, but his love of learning drove him to an eventual PhD and many international awards.

His early accounts are sprinkled with humor, which balance the suffering of his life:

In the country it spelt heavy rains. And goats are impossible creatures to manage when it rains. The goats panicked and dashed about madly as if a huge flea had come among them. How often I cried aloud chasing the goats. If I caught one I belaboured the creature with a stick so that it yelled to the heavens for help. (p 27)

One of Mphahlele’s recurring themes is maintaining African culture while integrating positive elements of the West.  He advocated that we “know our Africa intimately, even while we turn into the world at large.” (His position on this is different from Mathabane’s, who was outspoken in his rejection of any form of superstition.)

What I do know is that about eight out of every ten Africans, most of whom are also professed Christians, still believe firmly in the spirits of their ancestors. We don’t speak to one another about it among the educated. But when we seek moral guidance and inspiration and hope, somewhere in the recesses of our being, we grope around for some link with those spirits. (p 64)

Mphahlele recognized the inadequacy of the Christian veneer as he gradually awoke to the underlying, unBiblical injustice of the very people who claim to teach it. While he discovered ways to grow personally and spiritually, the many stories of black people disadvantaged by a system that had no interest in justice and used the Bible to defend injustice, he had an epiphany:

For years I have been told by white and Black preachers to love my neighbour; love him when there’s a bunch of whites who reckon they are Israelites come out of Egypt in obedience to God’s order to come and civilize heathens; a bunch of whites who feed on the symbolism of God’s race venturing into the desert of the ungodly. For years now I have been thinking it was all right for me to feel spiritually strong after a church service. And now I find it is not the kind of strength that answers the demand of suffering humanity around me. It doesn’t even seem to answer the longings of my own heart.” (p 178)

Without rancor, he peels away the façade covering the sad fact that the church and many missionaries colluded with a perverted world view which held a government in thrall. He gives recognition to Trevor Huddleston, a lone Anglican who stood aloof from the “white man’s total disregard of justice and other human values.” 

A product of Bantu Education, Mphahlele identified it as a tool of oppression and acknowledged the significance of the Johannesburg Anglican Diocese which did the honourable and courageous thing: close down its schools rather than perpetrate a travesty.

Mphahlele also turned internally to the deep and emotional issues of living under apartheid. He verbalizes the futility of bitterness in this succinct metaphor:

I knew then what I had been looking for: a fatally beautiful lady called bitterness. I knew that I wanted to love her, caress her, kiss her; but not, in Swinburnian fashion, to be bitten to death by her. Only if I chased after her and loved her, could I strangle her. I could hang her up to dry and show her up to the mockery of the elements. (p 186)

Es’kia Mphahlele is a wealth of thoughtful, provoking challenges. He lived before apartheid was enacted, throughout its course, and lived to see it abolished after returning from exile to his beloved South Africa. He lived to encourage understanding and humanism, Ubuntu, among South Africans. We are the richer for his heritage.

Every stone shall cry: Kaffir Boy

Published in 1986, four years before apartheid was officially abolished and eight years before the first truly democratic elections, Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane is a voice from the township of Alexandra. This is not fiction, but autobiography, subtitled, “The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa.”

So, how did a young man, growing up in the worst of township conditions, with parents living there illegally, manage to learn to write at all--much less an articulate, vibrant, and passionate account of his life and family? His description of the Bantu Education system, under which he was schooled, marks it as a travesty. The constant beatings he received from the people mandated to educate him on the grounds that he did not have the proper uniform would have defeated a less determined person, and probably did drive many children out of schools that could at least have granted them literacy.

Not surprisingly, Mathabane’s inner strength came through his mother and grandmother. Both illiterate menial servants, they cajoled, inspired, threatened and encouraged him to choose the path of learning over the “tsotsi” (gangster) path. Mark’s vivid description of a gang of tsotsis murdering a father on the evening of payday is just one of the raw episodes that separates this book from sanitized accounts. This very close encounter with death also clarified the choice in Mark’s mind. However, it was the comics brought home from the place his granny gardened and the back-breaking labour his mother performed to pay his school fees that taught him to value a life committed to learning.

A critical element in Mathabane’s story is his father’s tenacious hold on all things tribal and African. Sadly, his father could not see the possible “best of both worlds” acceptance of some elements of education. As his father fought his mother’s championing of school, Mark was caught between them:

That night, at seven and a half years of my life, the battle lines in the family were drawn. My mother on the one side, illiterate but determined to have me drink, for better or for worse, from the well of knowledge. On the other side, my father, he too was illiterate, yet determined to have me drink from the well of ignorance. Scarcely aware of the magnitude of the decision I was making, or rather, the decision which was being emotionally thrust upon me, I chose to fight on my mother’s side, and thus my destiny was forever altered. (p. 134)

 So Mark continued the dichotomy, abandoning vast segments of his culture to seek a better life: this he found through avid reading and, unlikely enough--playing tennis. This may be a source of disappointment to many who would prefer a balanced acceptance of both cultures and what they offer. But Mark was forced to choose one or the other and sadly felt obliged to turn his back on his culture.

Although the book reads like the memoirs of a young person, it is against a background of understanding of the price his people paid for being born black in South Africa: 

There is a death far worse than physical death, and that is the death of the mind and soul, when, despite toiling night and day, under sweltering heat, torrential rain, blistering winds, you still cannot make enough to clothe, shelter and feed your loved ones, suffering miles away, forcibly separated from you. (p. 181)

The perception Mathabane brings, despite the polarized position of his parents gives great insight into more of the stresses and conflicts of township life, besides the standard weight of poverty, constant strain of police raids and degradation from the laws of apartheid.

This book is not for the faint-hearted, but it is an authentic voice of one who grew within the dehumanizing township and was able to escape through friendly white friends on a tennis scholarship. Mathabane went to an American university and now lives in the US, modeling a rainbow family. He is a speaker and writer on these important issues.

Every stone shall cry: Cry, the Beloved Country

Alan Paton is our first Voice to consider in the anti-apartheid genre; his sensitive, poetic rhythms contrast the gentle Zulu syllables against the harsher Afrikaans and English words. The disparity of languages is his setting to explain the inexplicable: how people came to hurt one another over the colour of their skin. Paton’s writing is beautifully repetitious, catching phrases that resonate throughout the book, literally translating passages of Zulu for the non-speaker, and imparting the languid feel of those living far from the city rush. Interestingly, many foreign reviewers compare Paton’s prose to Biblical English, not recognizing the correlation to the bantu roots. (Paton was fluent in Zulu and worked for thirteen years as principal of a reformatory for delinquent “African” boys.)

“Cry, the Beloved Country” came out in September 1948, before apartheid was official law in South Africa. It did not take long for authorities to detect the fire and beauty in the work, for Truth is Beauty, and it was banned. Many of us growing up outside South Africa read it in school, but with little enough explanation, for our teachers themselves did not understand the depth of the problem or pain Paton was describing. He may have been trying to alert the world to the coming crisis, but he wrote for South Africans.

Read these first three sentences of the book aloud, and you will feel the call of the bush veld and a lonely sense of something precious that is coming to an end:

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa.

These sentences launch two paragraphs which preface parts one and two. “Cry, the Beloved Country” is written in three parts, the first two telling almost parallel stories of two fathers (one black and one white) and their two sons. Both fathers’s hearts are broken, both sons’ lives are destroyed. The final part is an elongated epilogue which is Paton’s attempt to offer a solution for individuals because he can not see a way clear for a national solution. 

Part One is the story of the Anglican priest, Stephen Kumalo, going to Johannesburg to seek out his wayward sister, Gertrude, and his prodigal son, Absalom. It reads slowly and gently, for Kumalo is old and tired. Despite his weakness, Kumalo is able to contact those who help him in his quest. Although we readers push at the pace, the book cannot be rushed. Words must be said in certain ways and we are restrained by Paton:

They come out of the Court, the white on one side, the black on the other, according to the custom. But the young white man breaks the custom, and he and Msimangu help the old and broken man, one on each side of him. It is not often that such a custom is broken. It is only when there is a deep experience that such a custom is broken. The young man’s brow is set, and he looks fiercely before him. That is partly because it is a deep experience, and partly because of the custom that is being broken. For such a think is not lightly done. (p 186)

Part Two is the story of James Jarvis, Esquire of High Place farm, which stands high above Ndosheni, the parish of Kumalo. The language and pace pick up considerably, as he, too, finds himself reluctantly going to Johannesburg.

The Homeric quality of this story, two fathers and sons, playing out their roles, unaware of one another, holds everything together. And there are Shakespearean near-misses that frustrate us, just as they do in his plays. No, it is not hyperbole to compare these elements in Paton to Homer and Shakespeare because his tragedy is rooted in the pain and suffering of his beloved country. Paton’s love for and agony over his country is palpable. He uses the writings of Jarvis’ son to send his own message to South Africans. A message they could not read, because his book was banned:

We shall live from day to day, and put more locks on the doors, and get a fine fierce dog when the fine fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold on to our handbags more tenaciously; and the beauty of the trees by night, and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things we shall forgo. We shall forgo the coming home drunken through the midnight streets, and the evening walk over the star-lit veld. We shall be careful, and knock this off our lives, and knock that off our lives and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution. And our lives will shrink, but they shall be the lives of superior beings; and we shall live with fear but at least it will not be a fear of the unknown. And the conscience shall be thrust down; the light of life shall not be extinguished, but be put under a bushel, to be preserved for a generation that will live by it again, in some day not yet come; and how it will come, and when it will come, we shall not think about at all. (p 77)

Paton’s prophecy proved all too true. Lives shrank and people lived in fear: black and white. Half a century of brutal oppression followed these words. His metaphor of the light which shall not be extinguished, but put under a bushel, is the familiar Biblical parable. But it also refers to the word Afrikaans speakers used to describe themselves: “Doppers, after the little metal caps with which they snuffed out candles. They called themselves Doppers because they were deliberately and consciously extinguishing the light . . .so that they could do what they had to do in darkness.” (Rian Malan, My Traitor’s Heart)

Paton was a devout man and this work is is trumpet call to remind his countrymen that their faith could not be reconciled to what they were doing to their fellow human beings:

Thus even our God becomes a confused and inconsistent creature, giving gifts and denying them employment. Is it strange then that our civilization is riddled through and through with dilemma? The truth is that our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of high assurance and desperate anxiety, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions. (p 145)

Paton tells us what we need to hear, gently, attempting to give two points of view: the Black country dweller and the British city dweller. He does not try to communicate the Afrikaans perspective or the Black township culture. He limits himself to what he knows well; his sensitive, lyrical writing is easy to read and enigmatic at the same time:

The Judge does not make the Law. It is the People that make the Law. Therefore if a Law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the Law, that is justice, even if it is not just. (p 147)

Every Stone Shall Cry

This year a special group of people will turn 20. Here in South Africa, they are known as the “Born Free” generation. They were born the year apartheid died. At that time universities geared up in anticipation of their arrival in 18 years. And the country has changed at a creditable rate.

The Born Frees are weighted with the responsibility of Freedom without personal knowledge of what it cost those who fought for it. While they may acknowledge cerebrally that Freedom is not Free, the cost was not theirs. They have heard the names: Govan Mbeki, Oliver Thambo, Ruth First, Steve BIko, Robert Sobukwe. . . many streets and highways are named after these revolutionary heroes. But they have not listened for their voices.

Born Frees (of all colours) have grown up in the compost of decaying apartheid: the ones raising them could not have totally eradicated its vestiges from their hearts or lifestyles. But this privileged crew leads the generation of Free South Africans. Without having experienced apartheid, they are striking out without a compass. They have a vague idea of the miasma their fathers lived through and finally pierced; but it is not enough to give a sense of direction. Which way to Justice?

I shudder to think that maybe apartheid will be denied and claimed a historical fiction, just as the Holocaust is being undermined by groups whose interest lies in its discrediting. But lest we forget, we have libraries of their memoirs, memorials in most major cities, and II have personally seen tattooed numbers on concentration camp survivors’ arms.

Dear fellow travelers on this planet, there are books by those who struggled living under apartheid, too. Books by the oppressed and by those whose colour identified themselves with the oppressors. The inhumanity of apartheid struck both ways--the brutalizers and brutalized. These are important books, but as time moves on other books are being published, and these landmarks--touchstones of history--are being neglected for more palatable stories.

This year I hope to use Soli Deo Gloria to remind us of where South Africa has been. To listen again to the Voices of Experience. To help us regain a moral compass so that South Africa, as a model for other nations, can show us how to learn from our mistakes and become nations of justice.

Each entry describing a book and noting its contribution will have “Every Stone Shall Cry” in its title. These will not be book reviews, per se. The goal is to encourage us to read these writers who have something still to say, particularly in the New South Africa. If we do not remind ourselves where we have been, we are in danger of going in circles and returning to where we were. 

The goals are:

1. That we never forget the inhumanity of discrimination.
2. That we be inspired to read again that which sustains us.
3. That we begin to think and wrestle with important ideas.
4. That we grow in ubuntu, our humanity one with another.

If you have any books you would like to see considered, or are interested in making a guest contribution, please send me an email at:

karen@eastmountain.tv