Amongst the skies, it was once often rumoured that at the passing of darkness, a tiny, bright – but dark – luminous spark, hidden deep in the belly of the night, would swell into a giant light as it consumed its own surrounding darkness to greet the new day.

The day was always harsh and unkind, always threatening to thwart that contradictory dark luminous light. Night too hated the flickering light because it was preyed upon at the dawn of day. As it were, this ritual of loathing – self-loathing and mutual loathing – would continue far into the vastness of time and space.

Before the skies had come to being; before the beginning and close of time when the skies could witness this unending ceremony, it was from the wide tides and waters of the world that the story of the dark luminous spark was first heard and passed down. No one quite knows or remembers from where this spark came from, but from these waters it is said that if the young spark had any parents, one could have surely heard their cries, lamenting the dreaded fate of the child who led a life that was a double contradiction. Their aching hearts gave current to the tides and strength to the wind, in the hopes that perhaps the scales of fate may be swayed towards a more favourable outcome.

And so it was that night, day and dark light struggled, and together their unending dance battled against the movement of fate. When time came, the skies themselves decided to intervene, and an insurgency was mounted. Knowing that the sky would never fall in battle, the young light buried itself in the corners of the globe, where it moves with the tides of the world unseen during both night and day.

No one knows what became of the dark light. Today it is but myth, slowly passing from known memory. It is now only said that the dark light keeps moving on from place to place, searching. Sometimes there is no movement, it stops, and it seems the dark light will extinguish itself, but only to know it cannot; it is of both light and dark. And it must continue moving for it lies buried within the cosmic oceans.

Introduction

After reading Kabelo Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams, I felt terrible loss and sadness with the knowledge of how he took his own life at the age of 30, four years after the book’s publication. Not only does the book end on a somewhat optimistic note, but one could argue (depending on the metrics we commonly use to assess how an individual has dealt with life’s struggles) that he had found his footing in life as he was a commissioning editor at the SABC at the time of his death.

In a seemingly ironic twist of fate, or tragedy, Kabelo committed suicide a month after delivering the eulogy at Phaswane Mpe’s funeral – who was also a writer – and although the cause of his death remains unclear it is suspected that Phaswane took his own life too.

My initial urge was to write about how these young black writers who had meteoritic lives characterised by tragedy, intense and sometimes violent extremes and contradictions, could perhaps have had a different fate by exploring the trajectories their lives took. To reflect on how I find resonance with a great many aspects of their lives and work, as if they are signposts I’ve seen before imploring caution, whilst simultaneously affirming, giving hope and reassurance that we aren’t the first or necessarily the last ones to go through black existential fatigue.

I wanted to try think through and/or understand the causes or reasons and perhaps understand why in an existential sense, by comparing the trajectory their lives took to the otherwise more established stalwarts of ‘African Literature’ who by and large managed to age into being grey-haired and some of these authors are still with us today, for example, Wole Soyinka, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe (who passed when he was 82) just to name a few.

Kabelo Sello Duiker, Phaswane Mpe and Dambudzo Marechera were all dead by the age of 35.

In many ways, they are archetypes of the current rebellious undercurrents which have rocked South Africa over the last two years. Like the present generation, they too were confronted with the challenge of finding expressions of meaning and purpose as black people who’d been denied humanity and were merely trying to navigate existential conundrums with the promise of new found independence and the fruits of freedom ingrained in their minds. Unlike how we often read their work as prophetic texts articulating historically fated and inevitable paths in post-colonial contexts, the likes of Marechera and Duiker, or even Fanon for that matter who wrote Black Skin White Masks as his doctoral dissertation whilst he was 25, were in fact merely chronicling the events that were actually unfolding during their time and were documenting these experiences as they occurred.

The only thing perhaps mysterious about this and needing a little explanation, is that as a general trait of many writers, they often find themselves gravitating towards solitude and existing at the margins of society, not quite fitting in or finding a place or tribe to belong. This, in turn, builds a keen ability to perceive and understand things which perhaps are only learnt whilst living as an outcast. Indeed Duiker, Mpe and Marechera were all homeless at some point and lived as paupers and wondering beggars.

I have since extended a call to anyone who might be keen to co-author this piece with me and found a willing co-writer, Simbarashe Nyatsanza.

A point was raised as a response to the call for a co-author and the accompanying description of what it is I roughly wanted to do with this piece, and it stated that the list of selected authors is a heavily a boys club. Whilst this is true, the piece itself isn’t written with the intention of specifically looking into the lives of these particular individuals, rather the originating and dominant cause was simply for my own sense of closure, and perhaps more primarily I turn to writing and by extension reading whenever I feel lost and I’m looking for a sense of direction. The aforementioned names are simply for the purpose of evoking certain exemplar and serve as tropes of some sort.

Furthermore, I and my co-author Simbarashe have since decided that making any meaningful comparisons aside from broad and general contrasts would require significantly more work and time available than we were able to put in at the time of writing this piece.

However, as a direct response to the point raised: since the piece attempts to explore how “young people” navigate themselves in post-colonial contexts it is fitting to ensure that the piece reflects the demographic of young people, young black people in particular. Although the initial selection of the authors I chose had common connecting threads of dangerous, carefree, suicidal, depressed lives and were all suffering from some form of mental illness, uninhibited and reckless living further characteristic of the struggling writer archetype, the structural theme predominantly revolves around how young people attempt to deal with the status quo post flag independence. In this vain. one more author to include for this piece is Yvonne Vera who wrote amongst others Without a name and The Stone Virgins. She died when she was 40 and had attempted to kill herself at the age of 32.

I was going to include Yvonne Vera but was wary of being disingenuous which for the most part is why I didn’t initially add her to the list because frankly, the experiences she articulates are in significant ways dissimilar to aspects which foreground this piece and my motives for writing this, therefore by extension implying my limited ability to narrate those experiences aside from simply an observational standpoint.

More than that, most other black women and queer writers (at least those I’m aware of and have read) with similar or closely related trajectories who I suppose would be the comparative equivalent of people like Armah to draw comparative analysis with younger writers like Yvonne Vera to, write within a black American context, for example, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. I’m currently reading Buchi Emecheta though whose earlier writing is described as a way to keep her sanity.

Therefore since the above cluster of authors can broadly fit the term “young people”, or at least in so far as when they completed their writing, I decided to extend my exploration of the trajectories their lives took to contrast young people today with a particular focus on those who’ve found themselves forming parts of the different student movements.

In addition, by exploring the meteoritic lives they took on and understanding that as to some extent coping mechanisms of black existential fatigue, depression and anxiety, with how the current generation of young people attempts to navigate these dark seas and hope to find life after swimming against its undercurrents for so long, be it in merely surviving academia and university, the hustle of those who could not make it into the halls of these elitist institutions, or holding onto a vein idea of hope that things will get better, I hope perhaps a conversation can be generated discussing how to best support and heal each other, or at lease ward off the tragic endings to the extent where possible.

An important point to mention before we dive into this article is that before I began writing this piece, I decided to first read something a bit more uplifting because despite the somewhat optimistic note The Quiet Violence of Dreams ends on: for the most part, it is a sombre read and intense in some aspects. And, to balance the scales, I read The Healers by Ayi Kwei Armah, and it wasn’t necessarily uplifting – in fact, it ends with a somewhat patient and optimistic cynicism which is very characteristic of Armah. But the main objective was to balance the scales and that was achieved. I will explain what this means in a later section of this piece.

My thoughts of late have been concerned with trying to decipher ‘where to from here’. Consequently, this piece will be informed by my own experiences in trying to move through some of the aforementioned intentions of this piece, and I will draw from these experiences to the extent they relate to the comparisons and insights I wish to make.

This post will be in three parts and loosely structured as follows:

1. I will begin by locating where my headspace is present, which is predominantly in two parts: with the student movement and its future in relation to increasingly dominating divisions along partisan affiliations, and how that relates to my own foreseeable future.
2. The 2^nd part will explore some common traits of Marechera and Duiker’s lives particularly focussing on the high levels of mental breakdowns and psychosis, depression and anxiety, homelessness and I’ll link that to escapism (be it alcoholism drugs etc.) and its relationship to class (who gets to afford therapy and counselling, drugs, alcohol etc.). I think Duiker and Marechera offer a good juxtaposition for this comparison with the former an archetype of private school education, upper black middle-class parents and the comfort of suburbia, whereas the latter is a product of township squalor and absent parenting. More than that I think Duiker is an excellent candidate of spiritual existential angst whereas Marechera’s angst is more material and mental (for example his books Mind Blast and Cemetery of Mind elucidate just what a shattered mind looks like). Following that, I will then analyse how the same issues are experienced by this generation (at least as observed from my experiences in the student movement and my own brief encounters with said substances).
   • Drawing from the above I wish to contrast these experiences currently unfolding in relation to the critique which generally is regarded as implying a lack of discipline and seriousness on the part of the current younger activists as it relates to a genuine commitment to advancing the struggles of black people.
3. The 3^rd and final part will attempt to pave a way forward. Initially, I intended for this piece to be an attempt at a fictional short story with the title being ‘Children of Hope’ so I hope some of that creativity will be of use. This section will link the first part of this post to the older generation and thus have an intergenerational dialogue where ‘the children of hope’, whoever they are, can find life. I will also briefly remark on the paradox in the title and I hope this unravels itself as you read through the post.

The sections of writing by Simbarashe will be indicated with SN at the beginning and end of the text he has authored.

Part 1: Adrift Movement

Revolution in the literal sense of the word is movement. When one thinks of the student movements particularly in the nested UCT context, you can’t help but think of a boat adrift at sea. More pointedly the phrase ‘jumping ship’ comes to mind and I wonder about the decisions confronting those aboard a sinking ship; the thought process they embark on. Needless to say but for clarity’s sake the present context isn’t completely analogous to being on a sinking ship, except: when I think of the literal meaning of revolution, and the aims the movement espouses, I ironically feel better imagining myself on a sinking ship than trying to decipher through which decisions to make at this point in time.

Unlike a sinking ship where there is a relatively clear dichotomy, the proverbial ship that is the student movement is at this point merely an entity floating indifferently at sea, unconcerned about where it’s headed or what lies ahead. It is this stagnation, slow cooking rot, lack of a sense of urgency and an almost tangible immobility, which drives an aversion within me. Greater than that it is within this decay that the movement managed to nest all sorts of power mongering which has begun to creep out of the shadows and is slowly beginning to manifest. But, whereas on a sinking ship one can make a leap of faith in a final attempt to stay within life’s reach, I feel as though I’m in a situation quickly giving room to despair which in turn deadens all in its path.

SN. I was not actively involved in the wave of student protests that rocked the country between May 2015 and November 2016, the Fallist protest movements triggered by the explicit culture of surreptitious anti-blackness at the University of Cape Town, that found resonance with and captured the imagination of students across the country and beyond, and have basically led to a resurgence and promulgation of Black Consciousness Ideology in Universities and across the broader youth population. On the actual day that the Rhodes statue fell, I was crumpled up on an old couch somewhere watching the entire proceedings on TV.

My initial impression was an odd mixture of indifference and cynicism; coming from Zimbabwe with a vague understanding of the fundamentals of any kind change, protest action had gradually sedimented itself in the folds of my mind as an integral part of the culture and means of expression of the people whose country I had recently migrated into, nothing more than that. I thought the protests had nothing to do with me. Matter of fact I was a little appalled by the things I was seeing. To me, the protestors were a bunch of unprincipled and ungrateful hooligans who were undermining the value and prestige of studying at an institution like the University of Cape Town and had unessentially created the need to cause chaos and disrupt the normal functioning of the institution. Little did I know that these events were part of an ongoing struggle. Although I had at my disposal information that would have given context to the things I was witnessing I didn’t bother to look into it. Instead, I simply derived a position based on the facile understanding I had arrived at then.

It was until much later, after meeting individuals who had actually been actively involved in the planning and executing of the protests that I began to understand exactly what everything was about, particularly with the regards to the symbolism behind the statue and why it had to fall.

Cecil John Rhodes was a devoted British imperialist who deceptively amassed vast amounts of land in Southern Africa in the 19th century. One of his aims was to create a conglomeration of British colonies in the African continent that would stretch from the Cape to Cairo. He was an unapologetic racist who at one time made the remark that “The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of South Africa. I prefer land to niggers”. During his lifetime Rhodes reflected an attitude that was the norm among his people, an attitude of superiority and all-importance which he, like most Britons of the 19th century, derived from the fact that he was Caucasian and came from Europe. Not only did he believe in and publicly claim the superiority and sanctity of the Caucasian race, he also thought that colonisation was eventually for the overall betterment of the human race and that Africans, in particular, had much to benefit from European influence.

Rhodes’ influence on the continent can still be felt to this day. He is known for the Rhodes scholarship that was created through his will. Each year the Scholarship enables 83 students from across the world – notably from former British colonies like Hong Kong, Zimbabwe and several other Commonwealth countries – to study at Oxford University. Two former British colonies, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia (Zambia and Zimbabwe respectively), bore his name during the colonial era. There is a Rhodes University in South Africa and a Rhodes Memorial as well. The land upon which the University of Cape Town stands today was bequeathed to the University by Rhodes in the late 1890s during his tenure as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. The University later honoured Rhodes by unveiling in 1934 a bronze statue of a seated Rhodes overlooking the University rugby fields. His remains lie at Matopo Hills National Park, South of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.

Over time the statue served as a constant reminder of the legacy of imperialism and the dark truth of colonialism. It reeked of African helotry and was a continual Remembrancer of the atrocities committed by the British Empire against native Africans in the name of civilisation. Everybody surreptitiously acknowledged it. The statue symbolised the general attitude the institution has towards people of colour; an attitude of disdain, erasure and in many cases outright racism. It stood for the unseen but heavily felt atmosphere prevalent at the university; one that bestows immediately on black Africans an awareness of their blackness and the ugly reality of institutionalised racism. It is this attitude that creates the need for non-white students to aspire to a certain form of whiteness in order to function with as little hindrance as possible. Black students learn quickly to create false realities for themselves, undergoing a systematic form of self-denial, appropriating ideologies and mannerisms that they highlight as deterministic in how they are perceived by the broader varsity community. By implication, the statue stood for the legitimation of the whitewashing of the human condition i.e. the hidden culture that makes it apparent that the institution considers being ‘white’ as the default way of being and everything else a derivation of that set standard. This of course overtime pushed non-whites into a constricted space of being and expression, influencing most of the things that shape their perception and worldview, starting with how we speak and how we dress, who we keep around us, or whom we chose to be seen with, all the way to career choices and spousal preferences (where applicable) later in life.

A shift of paradigm became necessary at UCT in order to dismantle the bigoted attitude that characterised the institution. The protests served as catalysts for that change and the ultimate fall of the statue grew to mean the beginning of this shift towards a more inclusive and transformative varsity environment.

Despondency in cadre spaces

A few months after the fall (and the euphoria of the falling) of the statue I found myself in association with students who had been ardent proponents of Fallism and free decolonised education. My understanding of the circumstances leading to the inception of these concepts grew, and at the same time so did my awareness of the seemingly harmless air of despondency that seemed to characterise most of our engagements. The question of a way forward after the initial wave of protests seemed to bring about a keen sense of mental unease. There were frustrations that, out of anything else, arose out of an apparent lack of progression, out of a perceived stagnancy in the mobility of the movement itself and the causes for which it stood for. Cadres bemoaned the lack of seriousness and urgency with respect to the university’s approach to people’s lives, as well as an overall purpose for the general collective as the movement stumbled towards an unpleasant halt. Perhaps out of a sense of growing existential fatigue and intellectual angst, elements of self-destruction started to be evident in the general conduct and way of being of the cadres; it appeared as if cadres opted towards slowly removing themselves from spaces that did not appreciate and give value to what they (the movement) stood for and yet at the same time could not summon the devotion required to resuscitate the dying movement. The abuse of alcohol, prescription drugs, cigarettes, illegal drugs and other self-mutilating partakings became ways through which people dealt with the inconsistencies of being constantly seen in positions of contrariety, of being caught up in the middle of a perpetual struggle, and also as an escape from the harsh realities of life in an environment that seemed to present itself as against the very truth of their existence.  This brings to mind individuals like K. Sello Duiker, Phaswane Mpe and Dambudzo Marechera, archetypes of young black people across the nationality spectrum trying to locate themselves and understand their positionality and purpose in postcolonial contexts. Their struggles of identity and belonging as the supposed ‘born frees’ are made manifest in how they are alienated and divorced from their people and the world they are told to mould into.

– SN

Point of Return

When events have unfolded in such a way that they begin approaching the tail end of the tale, it’s at that moment the plain yet seemingly elusive realisations become apparent.

A comrade was recently saying to me that unlike a working class movement, or even a rural-based movement for that matter, when all is said and done unlike with the aforementioned, with student movements each goes his or her or their separate way. With a rurally-based movement, for example, the likelihood is that they all return to the ‘village’ if things didn’t go as planned, but with a student movement the die is cast in far different ways – naturally: some people care more about what their transcripts and fee accounts look like, familial obligations and black tax, and others have long made the decision that come what may, these are concerns they will overlook and cast aside. This is just to illustrate a tiny segment of the spectrum.

The most recent point of return that has come to emerge is the idea of a political home, primarily serving as a base of sorts to provide security and shielding against political foes. Understandably for many student activists it is assuring to know that should something go array there will be support provided for you, for example, one wants to know that should they get arrested or expelled as a result of a protest, there will be a concerted and organised effort to provide assistance. Historically within the movement, such help is afforded based on how much clout, political credibility and social capital one has accumulated, so obviously it is not surprising that some would opt to have a reliable structure to come to their defence should the need arise.

We are still to examine what fundamentally pushes individuals towards a political home or movements more generally. One could argue that the idea of creating safe spaces in one such indication of what drives people into these circles, and is analogous broadly to what theoretically a ‘home’ is or ought to be. The debate about whether such a thing as a safe space exists is one I’m not going to discuss, suffice to say there is obvious disgruntlement.

Nonetheless, what is most concerning is not the individual strategic or tactical rationalisations of these decisions but rather the simple fact that of all the reasoning none of it seems to suggest a fundamental conviction in the political ideology, or even the strategic direction, aligned with the decisions to have a political home. Instead what it happening is the misconstruing of the very same harm which made people seek out political homes: that is the shift fundamentally is simply no longer about acquiring protection and the safeguards mentioned in the preceding paragraph, rather it is about acquiring social currency and political capital using the political organisation as the vehicle to acquire greater clout, influence and power.

This quest for power simply for the purposes of mobility within political spaces sings too closely to countless stories and historical experiences which warn of the outcomes of treading such a path. No one is perfect but I’d be lying if I said there isn’t a sense of despondency when you feel like you are getting a glimpse of what the future of your contemporaries looks like. But then again who can ever speak with certainty about how these events will unfold? It’s also tempting to ask why one should say anything at all because for all I know I may be just as complicit, yet that seems like too easy a response.

Of course my read of the events and people’s motivations may be wrong, except when taking into account the fact that virtually all major decisions made in the movement have been revolving around individuals, and their social capital, it would be naïve at best for one not to assume that in any political setting the individuals involved in order to ensure anything – be it protection or the ability to advance certain aims – social currency and capital have become the backbone of exerting influence and control. My main disillusionment is simply how quickly we all seemed to have forgone the notions of changing not only our views and understandings of power but also how we use it.

Political party affiliations aside, one must also critically reflect on the inability of those who espouse nan-partisan ideals as the basis of organisation to retain new faces coming into the movement. It may be easier to critique individuals’ reasons for treading away from non-partisan paths, and not look to the shortcomings of non-partisan organisational abilities. That said, it’s also easier to pin the above as failures of non-partisan lack of organisation, whereas in effect many if not most of these failures are failures of the movement itself from as early as the beginning of Rhodes Must Fall. It’s easy to make this false equivalency because the movement has asserted itself as a non-partisan space so one would think that by extension the failures of the movement are non-partisan failures too.

Except, the death of movements is caused by a wide range of factors ranging from internal antagonisms and divisions to crackdowns from the state and institutions. And the movement has over the years lost mass and popular appeal – students feeling betrayed by leaders, used as pawns and the popularised phrase ‘protest cows’ whilst making personal sacrifices for their involvement in the movement.

Regardless when all is said and done we each have our individual points of return because of the inherent set up of the movement. And when I try to think of my point of return, I find myself almost back to square one, with some of the nagging tensions that drove me to this movement in the first place still growing bigger and louder, and perhaps I’m a little closer to understanding or answering where to from here (at least as far as I’m concerned), and yet, like the analogy of the sinking ship, the way the options and different trajectories are so deceptively simple and decisively clear makes me chill as I confront the choices before me.

Things are becoming clearer to me now and I have a greater sense of clarity which I had been searching for over the last couple of months. I know what I must do, which commitments to uphold, and how to keep afloat. But there is danger in merely staying afloat and being adrift; I’m currently trying to move away from this feeling of being in a dark unending sea drifting away. There’s a certain appeal in it though which makes it difficult to move away. But, with a little sincere effort and a sense of some conviction – which is the harder part, one can find some sense of direction.

In attempting to answer ‘where to from here’ as it relates to this section on adrift movement, one must first ask what is it that young people are turning away from and where are they headed? For one, after being raised in a society geared towards crude materialism and a ruling elite which grows more exclusive and predatory, (one which we seem closer to entering) gaining entry into this social order is not without its difficulty and of course the clear moral dubiousness. It is not surprising therefore that many choose to opt out. What then substitutes the social order being rejected?

From my observations and minor experiences young people today gravitate towards an alternative lifestyle steeped in alcohol, hallucinatory drugs, some elements of the hipster cool kid culture (which is really just derivative of postmodernism and eastern philosophy – Zen Buddhism, esotericism and mysticism), and critically, has sex as an elementary and driving force. As we will discover in the next section of this piece, although wonderful and highly creative, there is an ugly underside to this alternative social order. And perhaps, more importantly, these substitutes are simply not worthwhile alternatives nor are they sustainable, despite the clear need to establish different substitutes.

Part 2: The Dark Light

Fundamentally Duiker, Marechera and Mpe are archetypes of young black people trying to locate themselves and understand the world in postcolonial contexts. Their struggles of social mobility, economic security, identity and belonging as the supposed ‘born frees’ is made manifest in how they are alienated and divorced from their people and the world they are told to mould into.

SN. Marechera particularly exemplifies this assertion. On arrival in England (New College, Oxford, 1974), Marechera immediately experienced the shock of exposure to an environment that did not place tremendous importance on education as a pathway out of poverty; instead regarded it as more of a social experience other than anything else. Marechera deplored the value of an education that seemed to place him in similar rank to the British Upper Class\Aristocracy, bestowing on him a false privilege that vanished when he was later expelled from New College, Oxford.

Out of school and a place of abode, he fell into heavy drinking and the periodic use of marijuana, as well as voracious reading, as ways of alleviating the banality that had become his existence. In an interview conducted in 1986 with Alle Lansu, less than a year before his untimely death due to an AIDS-related illness, Marechera spoke vituperatively of the lack of support he endured during this period, from those “who did not understand the importance of literature”. Dambudzo had adopted a personal approach to literature; it was slowly becoming his life, and those who could not tolerate the “mood swings and madness” that came with it did not get his respect. It were the experiences encountered during this period that prompted the penning of the kaleidoscopic House of Hunger, a book that reads like a mesmerizing, meandering tale of the brutality and poverty of life in contemporary Rhodesia, as well as the mental processes that rendered violence, despair and insobriety a normal part of the everyday life.

Earlier in varsity, Marechera had been frustrated by having to be objective with his writing. His work strikes as a continuous experiment with form, as a stream of consciousness type of writing that aimed at giving voice to the latent content of his experiences, as well as a search for a larger purpose to life other than the need for a qualification as an authentication of his existence. He viewed African success in the British middle class as collaboration with the oppressor and vowed to never let the bureaucracy have any leverage over him. This explains the aberrancy that came to characterise his personality and approach to daily life; he purposefully failed to renew his study visa and undertook to take various freelance jobs in order to avoid being employed permanently by anybody. Marechera rejected the entire notion of authority, likening it to a hindrance to the expression of total freedom. In some of the later works, notably in Black Sunlight, Marechera opted for a racially ambiguous way of representing his characters, rejecting the nationalistic notion of Negritude that was popular with his contemporaries as a protest against the ‘classification’ and categorization of opinions and the power of influence they possess. His digressions on intellectual anarchy made him unpopular with authorities in Zimbabwe, whom at the time of Marechera’s return to the country were encouraging writers to come up with dignified and conventional works that would help in shaping the identity of the relatively young nation. Dambudzo’s avant-garde had no shade on the Zimbabwean literary spectrum.

Marechera considered the world madder than any individual could be. He regarded his dalliance with insanity as a breakout from the education-induced hypnosis he suffered throughout a large part of his adult life. When accused of attempting to set a college library on fire and given the choice between expulsion and psychiatric evaluation, he chose the former after less than three hours of contemplation, never admitting to any kind of instability. It comes as no surprise that a large part of the Zimbabwean literary society was convinced that he was mad. His continual defiance of the laws and morals of this society gave credence to the burgeoning myth of his lunacy; his life was a perpetual metamorphosis, he lived without certainty or a plan of sorts, surviving from one day into the next, contend if he got a place to sleep and a beer to drink. He was aware of his reputation among other writers, at one instant famously remarking that he “wasn’t being taken seriously here (Zimbabwe), treated rather like one treats a snake not knowing its intentions, rather like an eccentric grot on the social fabric of the country”.

A yearning for ‘ultimate freedom’ is a common theme in his works. Susan, a character in Black Sunlight, goes into a tirade while driving through an open field with the protagonist, centred on rejecting the warping of her understanding of concepts such as distance and time as influenced (distorted?) by the road signs they were passing along the road. She makes it a point to have sexual relations with characters who had rejected or were rejecting, traditional sex roles. She represented the relatively new and frighteningly abstract idea of sexual liberation that a few African writers of that period were grappling with. Another of Marechera’s characters in the book, Chris, builds a thesis on ancient Greek and Latin writers’ (sexual) experiences with excreta and other fetishes which is rejected for its explicitness. In many ways, the book can be seen as a beration of the mental torture subjected to Marechera throughout all the years of his education, and brief life.

Born on the 4th of June in 1952 in a small township called Vengere in Rusape, Manicaland, Charles William Dambudzo Marechera lived a childhood that was shaped by occasional flirtations with hunger, poverty and violence. The death of his father after a hit-and-run accident had a profoundly recusant effect on the young Marechera, who resorted to endless reading, and at times running away from home, as a means to cope with the new reality. Academically competent throughout his life, Marechera was awarded scholarships to study at St Augustine’s, the University of Rhodesia and at New College, Oxford and part of his notoriety is from having been expelled from the last two institutions for varying involvements in student demonstrations and alleged psychiatric impairment.

Towards the end of his life, Marechera was resorting to ‘selling out’ his profession in order to make a living. He was considering finishing his degree and even became a teacher for about six weeks. Marechera wanted to create a new role for himself, one that was congruent with the requirements of the circumstances he found himself in, and of course, that meant doing away with the discrepancy of his realities in Zimbabwe.

– SN

First a bit of a story about myself – it may be indulgent and even narcissistic, but hey, what would writing and blogging be if you can’t be a little self-indulgent huh?

There is a wide range of reasons why I have an aversion towards alcohol and smoking but for the purpose of this section, I’ll narrate a particular experience which may shed light on one reason specifically relevant to the above subheading.

The last time I got drunk in the material sense of the word, I found myself half sleeping on a pavement on Long Street after my legs were beginning to fail me and the dizziness in my head had become a weight too heavy to carry. This was in my first year of university when two pals of mine who shared the same dining hall with me decided it was high time we explored the infamous Long Street and in a matter of minutes I found myself splitting a cab fare to town.

Interestingly this wasn’t the first time I’d gotten drunk so it wasn’t necessarily an issue of not knowing how to ‘control’ the liquor, rather, I’ve since found that like many other things I have a penchant or natural inclination towards severe extremes and I never quite figured out a balance, so somewhat regrettably it’s an all or nothing case at this point. Anyway, after that experience the vision that remained of being that guy who sleeps on street pavements and seems to have some sense of freedom was in my mind – subconsciously I think this perhaps was just my projection of wanting to be a wondering/ascetic monk. But more importantly, if you have read Dambudzo Marechera or K. Sello Duiker you’d know exactly the type of character who sleeps on park benches and is homeless, often a university dropout, and a struggling writer/artist who of course smokes and drinks heavily.

When I discovered the ease with which something similar could be my trajectory I managed to revert back to old structures which had kept me from going astray in high school, and for a while they were effective. The scary thing then and now is I don’t find the thought of that particular path scary and in fact, it’s strangely exciting, and has a feel of freedom to it which I have always yearned for.

Long story short, I particularly avoid smoking and alcohol because in many ways they act as substitutes for this particular yearning for respite, freedom, and offer momentary glimpses to what it is I desire. At best they may set me on the path completely and I am not sure at this point whether that is both wise and something which will bring me what it is I desire. So in the interim, I’ve attempted to find some discipline.

When one looks to Kabelo Duiker and Phaswane Mpe’s lifestyles, they managed to find a sense of regulation as they were entering their late 20s. Marechera only later on in his 30s considered a teaching profession. Ironically though women writers like Yvonne Vera and Buchi Emecheta had found some sort of grounding much earlier on; their writing was disciplined and balanced between work, school and in some instances raising a family.

Earlier on though as with many experiences of young people, their lives were cannon fodders of acquiring various experiences, helping them self-create as they confronted the bane of existence. Perhaps this self-creation is far more evident in Marechera who by and large is provides a more definitive example of making yourself into existence.

Looking back one might say the failure of these young people was in not being able to channel their efforts at self-creation into a dialogical and dialectical process with the societies and the world they lived in. Too consumed, perhaps rightly so, with their own burdens, they inadvertently isolated their process of self-creation, inevitably resulting in a shelled existence. For example, one of the things Marechera is infamous for is his rejection of the ‘writer’ as one who writes for a purpose, which at the time post flag independence, was concerned with nation building and the process of Africanisation in post-colonial states. Unlike the likes of Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o who understood their work as having a historic sense of purpose, the writers which followed that generation rebelled against the very idea. For them, the idea of ‘African Literature’ didn’t make sense – and it truly doesn’t make sense as a ‘genre’ or form of writing because we are yet to know or understand what it is – but more importantly they felt that the role of the ‘African’ writer was one already scripted and pre-determined. To escape these confines, they attempted to reinvent both themselves and how they wrote.

This reinvention fuelled by the fire of rebellion I still maintain only had its flaw in not being channelled into a dialectical process with society at large. Because even if you can self-create, it means nothing if the world you live in doesn’t allow for the expression of that self, or for that matter for you to even exist in it. It is why the vast parts of their lives were spent in depressed states. On one hand they found inherent meaning in their own work, but meaning is a dialectical component of purpose (action) and the two must exist as such: the act of self-creation – of ascribing meaning and defining yourself – is only a true act of self-creation in so far as that creation can actualise, that is meaning is defined not only by the act of ascribing meaning but by acts, deeds, in other words, purpose.

It is here that the romanticism of Marechera and the likes comes to burst. One must first acknowledge the precious gift bequeathed to us by that generation; what I like to call the dark light: they have showed us that it is possible to reimagine ourselves into existence and define the meaning of our own lives. And just as the dark light is a contradictory idea, their act of self-creation as an act of rebellion defining their lives as such ultimately became a means of their own undoing – it was self-defeating because invariably their existentialist conceptions of finding meaning fell short because specifically for black existentialism that dialectical approach of reimagining the world must occur in tandem with their own individual quests for freedom. The second layer of this contradiction and where the bubble comes to burst is that by failing to expressly want to co-create the world as they self-create, they inadvertently, in fact, leave behind an example of what an alternative social order looks like. This, of course, is the world steeped in despair, particularly the loss of hope leading to substance abuse and subsequently anxiety, depression and suicide as inevitable alternatives when their rebellious self-created persons fail to find expression in the world as it is.

Whilst one could argue that the burden of co-creating an alternative world isn’t one which necessarily can be imposed on individuals who simply want to find meaning in their lives, I would respond on two levels:

Firstly with specific reference to circumstances and context; I think that for black people existentialism applies in significantly different ways, hence black existentialism, and here facticity is a critical component – that is to say political, cultural and socio-economic factors beyond your control play a more definitive role in identity formation and construction, even to the extent where one could say “circumstances made me who I am”. This, of course, does not mean that individuals are stripped off their agency nor imply that there is some sort of determinism which foretells people’s lives. The consequence of facticity is not only that these are moral obligations to some extent, but they are historical too and in some sense can even be seen as socially accruing in a manner somewhat analogous to familial obligations (society and the idea of a family are both social constructs so the analysis holds). By extension, this links the idea of meaning with some semblance of purpose.

More than that, and secondly, it is often those that feel alienated by existing social orders who invariably choose what some would call an existentialist path. And here I wish to quickly reference the idea of safe spaces mentioned earlier. If one were to accept the position that there is no such thing as a safe space then there are few avenues for alternatives. I wish to explore three different paths: creating a commune, pursuing individual freedom, and the grand idea of changing the world or more realistically the life of struggle.

The first path: you could choose to create a community of like-minded individuals and attempt to make that space conducive to self-determination and self-actualisation as much as possible. In physical or psychological terms it very well may be safe, but this corner of existence will inevitably feel the weight of the inherent contradictions of its existence. As a simple example, one would need to reconcile the moral consequences of exiting a violent world and fashioning out a different commune to the exclusion of those not able to, and further live with the ethical dubiousness of not directly intervening to stop the violence.

If you do succeed, you may find a level of meaning, purpose, even happiness and fulfilment, but all these would be of limited significance in direct material terms (obviously and arguably in the ‘greater scheme of things’ or even in a metaphysical sense the significance of one such initiative could be immeasurable, but for the here and now not so much). But this commune could choose to undertake the struggles outside its space directly, but by extension and as a direct consequence would no longer be a safe space, both physically and psychologically.

A second possible alternative is one we’ve discussed at great length, which is the creation of individual freedom. This alternative too, faces the same moral and ethical dilemmas if you are one persuaded that there are legitimately placed obligations on such individuals, however, to differentiate between whether this path would have a preferred outcome to the first alternative, the outcome must be greater than the outcome of successfully creating a commune.

I think the idea of freedom is extremely appealing, possibly even more compelling than the idea of one’s life having a sense of meaning or ultimate significance. Personally, this would be a likely avenue to follow but only on the condition of a sense of certainty or rather ‘guaranteed freedom’ which sounds ridiculous. As you might have guessed there is no certainty, in fact by far this alternative is the least certain and the riskiest of the three – Que cases of suicide, depression vis-à-vis K. Sello Duiker et al. As the saying goes however high risk equal high returns, except, no one really knows what the gains look like, specifically what freedom looks like. And understandably the few examples we have of avant-garde personalities are only fleetingly appealing and seem not only miserable and devoid of happiness but also both unrealistic and unsustainable.

Beyond the fact that the second alternative makes one ask what does freedom even mean and what it should or ought to be, the outcome one gets if successful is possibly marginally higher than the outcomes of the first alternative.

Hypothetically, perhaps you accept and reach a level where you embrace the absurdity of the world, lack of inherent meaning and purpose. Maybe you even find it no longer necessary to self-create or define for yourself the meaning of your life. The only real question becomes how this will materially and directly translate in the world as it is, and how you practically live. At this stage, I think we can assume said individual would have set aside or disavowed particular obligations e.g. Marechera denouncing the idea of writing for a nation or purpose, so you don’t feel that weight and can sleep comfortably at night. It would seem to me therefore that because the first and second alternative has the same negative outcome, the second alternative has a greater likelihood of successfully disavowing this. In addition, the positive outcome of the first alternative is predicated on a sense of fulfilment, meaning, purpose (though limited), whereas with the second alternative if these ideas are successfully disavowed they become irrelevant. The shortcoming of the first option is its success is contingent on these ideas.

However, the second alternative is the riskiest and arguably has a low success rate on the basis of prior cases. In fact, there are more examples of successful communes than those of stories of individual freedom which don’t end in misery, depression and suicide. I really wish I had more time to discuss the act of suicide in greater depth particularly from a human freedom and existential point of view, but maybe in another post or hopefully in the last section. Suffice to say outside of despair and misery, if one accepts the concepts of the absurdity of the universe, lack of inherent meaning and or purpose then one should also accept suicide as a rational and logical outcome of existential thought. This too may be an outcome of the second alternative except instead of it being a result of misery etc. etc. it is rather done in the act of one’s freedom.

The third and last alternative: the life of struggle or embarking on the idea to co-create the world. Obviously the most difficult, but with respect to the positive outcomes of the first alternative, here they are simply more pronounced and heightened. Therefore a greater sense of significance tangibly and materially, fulfilment, meaning and purpose. Moreover, with this alternative ‘failure’ has a more charitable interpretation. For example, one could have a sense of pride even fulfilment in that the struggle itself has or had inherent meaning, and comfort in the fact the person did what they could. Negative outcomes are difficult to define in this context because they could mean many things, rather I think the idea of opportunity costs would be a more effective in outlining what to gain and lose. These too are also difficult to flesh out or outline as that too is context depended.

I think what gives the third alternative credence is a sense of moral superiority associated with this alternative, therefore that mitigates whatever negative outcomes to some extent. But personally, I believe that this alternative is more conducive to a dialectical approach vis-à-vis individual freedom as I’ve stated earlier using the cases of the writers.

I, therefore, maintain that the dark light is what would push us to individual freedom, and out of that contradiction is an opportunity for a dialectical approach. This, however, would require a greater amount of discipline and organisation.

Class and Discipline

The subheading is misleading so to be clear I in no way intend to even fractionally discuss class as it has manifested in the movement because to do that would require a separate piece and this topic has been scantily discussed there’s no solid baseline from which one could confidently have the conversation. Rather I’d simply like to offer a class response to Duiker and Marechera’s untimely deaths.

Specifically, I would like to look at class in a way that relates to what could have been done to prevent such tragic outcomes, for example, Duiker spent time in mental institutions and was able to access and afford prescription drugs, psychologist visits and psychiatric treatment, whereas Marechera struggled to get by on a daily basis in terms of finding a place to sleep each night and foot to eat.

This is relevant because, in as much as it is important that there is an increased awareness about the scope of what mental illness is, it is currently a perpetuation of privileging certain experiences. Often, that privilege mirrors along class lines. Inevitably the full weight and gravity of mental illness, is dismissed when terms such as anxiety and depression are invoked without necessarily explaining the importance and deeply underlying states those words connote. It’s no surprise therefore when there’s a dismissal of anxiety or depression as an illness when, after all, a great number of people survive in a constant state of nervous conditions: not knowing if the electricity bill will be paid, school fees, rent etc. are all looming dreads on a monthly basis.

I’m not going to define what class is because that’s another can of worms, but I would like to say that the understanding I espouse is one which is not limited to a Marxist conception of owning means of production and capital, rather I hold a class understanding linked to social mobility, stratification and positionality.

For example, if you have two students who both come from similar backgrounds in terms of their community and household income, one attending UCT and the other the University of the Western Cape, because of the position and status UCT holds as this prestigious university; it has greater access to upward social mobility, therefore the UCT student has class privilege in that sense. This is, of course, a simplified example but I hope it conveys the point.

SN. K. Sello Duiker, in a strange case of contrariety to Marechera, felt, towards the end of his life, that he had bought into, and become trapped in, the prevalent culture of commodification, commercialism. As commissioning editor for the SABC, he found himself burdened by this capitalistic sense of living, a position that led to a steady development of self-hatred and admittance of an “inability to protect himself from life”. He took his own life when he felt that his “mood-stabilising medication was taking too great a toll on his artistic creativity and joie de vivre”.

Sello’s work deals with the phenomena of street survival, alcoholism, violence, race misrepresentation and sexuality. In Thirteen Cents Duiker tells the story of the coming of age of twelve year old (racially ambiguous?) Azure in the harsh streets of Cape Town. The book opens with young Azure returning home to find his parents lying dead in a pool of blood. This signals the beginning of his descend into a life of homelessness characterised by occasional spats with violence and sexual exploitation at the hands an insatiate clientele made up of old rich white men. It is a tough read that can be seen as an extension of the role of literature in shaping identity, in this instance gay and destitute identity, an area which Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Buchi Emecheta and other writers of that calibre emphasise greatly on in their own works.

The parallels between Sello’s life, or at least his convictions, and that of his characters is evident to those who have known the man. Like Tshepo in The Quiet Violence of Dreams, Sello experimented in the sex trade and also had experience with intoxicants. He suffered from ‘cannabis-induced’ psychosis and was at one point institutionalised at a psychiatric institution for two months. Unlike Marechera who had a background of absent parenting and rural schooling, Sello received private school education and can be said to have had a relatively well-off upbringing, and yet he found himself constantly drawn by the dreadful excitement of life in the street, out of the conventional, warm space in which he had been raised.

– SN

When I first encountered the Marechera narrative it was in the heyday of Fallism (2015), in many ways he’s resurgence was simply a tool to energise the space and popularise the rhetoric of student activists. And it worked. Aside from being an iconic writer, for many, he was also an example of an individual looking to find some sense of meaning and freedom. Therefore his death and lifestyle though accepted to an extent as tragic, was nonetheless also characterised as a part of this chasing freedom narrative. By extension, his death was only an inevitable concomitant; one which didn’t necessarily evoke feelings of loss or grief.

Whereas with Duiker and Vera, my first genuine responses were sadness and a sense of grief. My first rationalisation from a class understanding was that Duiker and Vera were exceptions to the stories of success which usually are a birthright to children born to black middle class parents: you go to good schools growing up, university, go overseas and study abroad to get a masters and come back home and form part of the educated black elite, ready to lead the country. Duiker was no exception to this trajectory. Therefore, in part, his death evokes more sadness (at least for me) because there is a sense that life wasn’t ‘meant’ to have dealt him his untimely death. Contrast Marechera; he is no exception to virtually unaccounted for people who we see daily sleeping on street corners, hardly does this image evoke much sympathy because we’ve grown used to it. His death was usual and common.

There is the fact that Duiker took his own life, I’m not sure whether I’m just sad because I maybe believe that there is something intrinsically valuable about life. I don’t particularly find anything sad about death but using the phrase ‘loss of life’ does seem to carry more weight in evoking some emotion, whereas one can accept death as simply a part of life. Therefore it’s not quite ‘they died, therefore, you’re sad’, but when how and why.

Marechera in this sense comes out as more heroic; he didn’t quite succumb to his existential angst, though his lifestyle also implies he might as well killed himself, he didn’t actually want to die. I think on some level it’s why I don’t feel that sad about his death because it’s like someone who died in battle – they died fighting and that’s part of the battle or war. With Duiker on the other hand, suicide has a sense of one’s resignation (though of course there is an actual debate to be had about the legitimate taking of one’s life), but even then, one feels loss because the quest for freedom and meaning has been forgone when one chooses death.

But anyway, from simply a class perspective, Duiker had a greater chance of survival hence not only his death but his killing himself are outliers.

Discipline

To conclude part 2 of this piece I want to comment briefly on the issue of discipline. It seems obvious to say that had these authors been more disciplined such tragedies could have been averted, and this is true to a degree. Whilst it’s plain and simple enough, it also risks being too simple.

Nonetheless having discipline is difficult, it takes a while to learn and master. In addition to the need for a regulated structure, you also need a level of commitment in order to be disciplined. It’s the latter part which makes it so difficult to be disciplined. After all, one could even say that Dambudzo was disciplined in his religious consumption of alcohol because he was committed to that lifestyle.

In as much as commitments go there are simply some things, you can choose to uphold or accept, or choose to let go. Familial obligations are one such commitment but surprisingly easy to let go off. There needs to be another motivating factor, one ideally intrinsic to you, which ironically has a sense of meaning and if you’re lucky purpose. But that’s only ideally otherwise if you try searching for that chances are you’ll find yourself in constant existential despair when you need to do simple things. However, even for the simple things you still need a solid base to work from.

And here it is then that the critique levied towards current student activists, particularly from older activists, of not having a genuine commitment to the liberation of black people implies a lack of discipline. If the logic holds, your commitment will inform how disciplined you are, therefore if you aren’t disciplined you have no commitment.

The real question then when it comes to discipline is what it is we ought to be committing to, and on my part, these are still difficult questions to answer. On some part by merely doing certain things you tacitly or implicitly commit to certain things, though it may not necessarily be the case or true. For the more important aspect of this question, I’ve found that simply committing to yourself; to do your best, what you can and are able to, to take care of yourself, are usually good places to start, and everything else seems to fall in place once you’ve made some strides in upholding commitments to yourself.

Part 3: Children of Hope

Two weeks ago I was at a memorial service for a student who was a resident of my current residence, and he died by committing suicide. This was the second memorial service at the same residence I’d attended within a space of just over a year with the same cause of death.

I remember the new DVC Mamokgethi Phakeng in her speech saying that our children are the hope (and our hope) for and of the future, and the boy’s aunt said something similar. I don’t want to go into detail about the exact contents of the aunt’s speech relating to the student’s life in general because it’s probably not appropriate to do so.

Nonetheless, this invocation of hope left me feeling uneasy and pensive. And I recalled Buchi Emecheta’s classic novel The Joys of Motherhood which I’d just finished reading. There is a tragic irony in the phrase, and I suppose this irony to me was compounded by the context within which it was being invoked.

I first had the idea to write a short story simply titled Children of Hope almost two months ago, and in that story, the opening scene would have been on a Saturday afternoon with three children preparing a lunch meal. In my imagination, there was a momentary piece of happiness in a scene where one of the children was cutting up butternut. But I couldn’t develop the plot further in line with this kind of joy the idea had come to me with, instead, when I thought about it more I seemed to increasingly think that children of hope are actually tragic, sad, and the hope from which they are born from is somewhat distant to them.

It is tragic because it seems with every passing generation there is a deferment of certain expectations to the ‘future’, and it is up to its inhabitants to realise certain dreams and aspirations. Perhaps this is a generic aspect of the evolution of societies, but when looked at in the specific context of liberation struggles in neo-colonial states the tragedy unravels because the children of hope are already born out of destitution, and they are bound to fall into similar trappings. Existentially this too is tragic because the ‘here and now’ is foregone in how people make their decisions.

The central character in The Joys of Motherhood pinned her hopes on her children to secure her future, only to die alone, except here the irony is the children of hope are to some extent fated to not only be like their proverbial parents but also have that fate far sooner.

But we remain hopeful, in all our contradictions and shortcomings. And even in that we hope to not fail to see the world as it is, to look at ourselves honestly.