Books Column: The proverbial boat is now a wreck – dear novelists, don't miss it again

The epigraph page of the late Jeremy Gordin’s biography of Jacob Zuma, published in 2008, contains a gleefully plucked quote from Leonard Thompson’s A History of South Africa, which appeared seven years earlier: “The new President [Thabo Mbeki] appointed as Deputy President Jacob Zuma, a loyal ANC member who had no formal education and posed no challenge to Mbeki’s leadership.”

One wonders how many successive editions of Thompson’s book that quote survived.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, South African writers have, as a class, singularly failed to take a proper swipe at Zuma and the corrupt state that metastasised across the country over the past decade and a half, mainly under his acquisitive watch. Not to mention the foetid princelings – the former president’s various handlangers overseeing our cancer’s progress. For example, I’ve read odious, state-funded panegyrics written for the likes of Ace Magashule, instead of what he truly deserves – what all politicians probably deserve – a starring role in a bitter satire that leaves him reputationally flayed and mewling in the Free State dust. Any takers for that project?

But I digress. I should qualify my sweeping j’accuse about our writers, I suppose: for it’s mainly the novelists who are at fault. Journalists and non-fiction authors have performed in spurts, producing perhaps a third of a metre of reportage, when measured by the spine, on the subjugation of South Africa to uBaba’s crushing whims. This includes Gordin’s biography, which is quite sympathetic to Zuma, and written with a surprising measure of literary conceit. Gordin’s style places his book, as a read, a cut above some of the more recent titles, which go for the jugular but are themselves rather bloodless.

Thanks to Gordin and his successors in prose, then, Zuma Lit is not completely lacking in our bookstores. But boat after boat has been missed by those who write for the fiction section. 

This was not the case with South Africa’s first two presidents, each of whom attracted a major novel to stand impudently next to their legacies. For the author of Long Walk to Freedom, it was Lewis Nkosi’s Mandela’s Ego that did the job – as big a piss-take of the official record of its subject’s life as might be conceived. Here is a case of satire shattering myth upon myth like so many stones thrown against so many mirrors.

For Mbeki, the work that bookends his failed presidency is Imraan Coovadia’s High Low In-Between, which came out the same year that Zuma ripped his former boss out of the Union Buildings. Like Nkosi’s, Coovadia’s novel stands in opposition to certain official narratives about Mbeki, but obliquely. The book rummages in the darkest depths of the Aids denialism that Mbeki enabled, and simmers with rage at the president’s smugly obtuse relegation of thousands of his citizens to their early graves. If books were statues, this one would be a rigidly righteous middle finger, carved of soapstone and standing 12 feet high – such a statue as we crave attends all those who are powerful and puffed up. Every president deserves one.

(That said, we need not worry about the likes of Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri and Kgalema Motlanthe, who kept the presidency warm before it passed from Mbeki to Zuma. Both were puffed up but neither were powerful: no novels or statues required for them.)

If every major president deserves at least one major novel to mark their time in office, written by a writer whose internal compass for bullshit unfailing points true north, some, unfortunately, don’t get what they deserve. Such has been the case for the past 15 years.

Fortunately, writers of fiction, you have been granted the reprieve of a lifetime by the recent election, which has seen Zuma come storming back from the political wilderness to threaten, once again, the destruction of the country, with bushels of torment for the hapless Cyril Ramaphosa thrown in for good measure. Between the two of them, and the retinue of characters each has assembled around him, there are such fruits for a satirical or cholera-inflamed imagination to pick as might be expected in the of Garden of Political Anti-Eden we all live in.

Just imagine: alongside Jacob and Cyril, we have Fikile Mbalula, John Hlope, John Steenhuisen – John Steenhuisen! who is probably about to walk backwards into a position of national import – and all the other wannabes and loons (Zille! Niehaus!), assembled like sitting ducks, ready to be collected and shown their asses by someone’s auspicious pen. Who can match the likes of Nkosi and Coovadia, and delineate the truths of the new political dispensation that only fiction has the power to convey?

Assuming our free press survives for the next little while, novelists, I plead with you: get to work. Don’t miss this boat, which might convey you to literary immortality. Otherwise, we’ll be in danger of skipping two utterly deserving presidents in a row. DM