Father of Sestigers caused Afrikaans upheaval


No Afrikaans writer was quite as revered as Jan Rabie was before his death last month, just one day after turning 81. And for many years few Afrikaans writers were quite as reviled.

Before his groundbreaking collection of 21 short stories, titled 21, was published in 1956, Afrikaans prose literature was for the most part (Eugene Marais being a rare exception) insular, cosy and intellectually unchallenging.

The great Afrikaans poet N P van Wyk Louw characterised it as "congenial, local realism". Simplistic, one-dimensional stories of farm and small-town life were the order of the day.

Rabie's writing burst through this claustrophobic cultural smog and exposed Afrikaners to the intellectual currents that had been sweeping the world since the end of World War Two.

He introduced Afrikaans literature to modernism, and sharpened the Afrikaners' understanding of what it meant to be a modern man or woman.

His writing stimulated a highly critical and, in Afrikaans prose, novel questioning of what the government was doing in the name of Afrikaner nationalism.

When 21 hit the shelves, those who understood what he was writing about quickly recognised this unpretentious, slim volume as a coming of age for Afrikaans.

The new direction it signalled was eagerly pursued by progressive young writers who became known as the Sestigers.

Rabie was as much a product of his time and place as anyone else, and he was only able to produce such a trumpet blast because he had been living in Paris for seven years, since 1948.

It was only from this distance, as he acknowledged, that he was able to see "the cracks in [South African] society".
As he looked from afar at what was happening in South Africa he began to realise what an "abomination of selfishness" apartheid was, and how it was being elevated as "a sort of religion".

Late in 1951, after four years in Paris, he woke up one morning with a story already "cut and dried" in his head, without having consciously planned it. It appeared in 21 under the name Droogte (Drought), and became one of the most telling commentaries on apartheid ever written in Afrikaans.

Essentially the story is about a white man building a house from inside while a black man shouts in vain from outside to be let in. Once the house is finished the white man realises that he has imprisoned himself.

There was little exceptional about Rabie's writing or political thinking before he went to Paris.

He was born on November 14 1920 to extremely religious parents.

His father was a schoolteacher outside Stilbaai, a tiny village on the southern Cape coast about 250km from Cape Town. Jan ran around barefoot, fished, swam and developed an intimate attachment to nature that later informed his life and much of his writing.
He matriculated in nearby Riversdal and obtained a Master of Arts degree in Afrikaans and Dutch at Stellenbosch University. During the war years he taught in Knysna and at Umtata in the Transkei.

His close friend was the Afrikaans poet Uys Krige, whose appetite for adventure took him to different parts of the world as a war correspondent. Krige told Rabie he needed to broaden his horizons, and at his prompting he went to Paris in 1948.

He kept a diary of his experiences there, and a catalogue of poverty it is. He worked as a porter and did whatever other odd jobs he could. He even made a few francs as a nude model for art students.

In the evenings he collected leftover cabbage leaves from market stalls and boiled them into soup, a diet that kept him going for up to three weeks at a stretch.

Meanwhile, he drank in everything that Paris had to offer by way of music, street life, nightclubs and art. He spent every Sunday poring over paintings at the Louvre.

More significantly, as far as his writing was concerned, he was introduced to the thoughts and works of other writers. He was strongly influenced by their experiments in surrealism and expressionism, and by the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. He was deeply impressed by the importance that was attached to literature as a means of confronting major issues.
All the time, he had one eye cocked on what was happening at home. And the more he grew intellectually, the more disturbed he became. He felt increasingly guilty about his disengagement from events there, and decided he should go back. "I could no longer enjoy Europe," he said later.

In 1955 he returned to South Africa with the stories that would be published the following year as 21. Ironically, given their monumental status in Afrikaans literature, Rabie had written them in English first, before translating them into Afrikaans.
That was partly an angry reaction to the refusal of Nasionale Pers to publish an earlier novel of his, but mainly because he wanted to bounce his work off his friends in Paris and they, of course, couldn't read Afrikaans.

Along with his stories, Rabie brought back with him a wife. Marjorie Wallace was a painter from Scotland whom he had met in Paris in 1949.

Late in 1954, too poor to buy her a Christmas present, Rabie had offered her his hand in marriage instead. The couple remained married until his death. Rabie taught Wallace Afrikaans, and she spoke it fluently - never losing her Scots accent.

Rabie's use in 21 of surrealism and other techniques he'd been playing around with in Paris meant that its criticism of apartheid was evident at first only to a small number of perceptive readers. Most members of the Afrikaner establishment were bemused.
That was not the case with Ons die afgod (We the Idol), which followed a year later and was far more overtly political. As the title suggested, the central theme was that whites had made an idol of their colour. In effect, and long before anyone else went as far as that, Rabie was saying that apartheid was blasphemous.

Members of the establishment needed no telling that blasphemy was a terrible sin. They were outraged. They denounced Rabie as a liberal and a communist, the two dirtiest words in their lexicon.

In addition to his fiction, Rabie developed polemical writing as a respectable genre in Afrikaans. His pieces were published in Die Burger in the 1960s during an era of open and free debate in that newspaper's pages.

He hammered home the dangers of the government's obsession with race, and the threat posed to Afrikaans by making it a "white" language. He couldn't find anyone prepared to publish the pieces in book form, and so he did so himself under the title Polemica.
Rabie spent the last 30 years of his life at his home in Onrus on the southern Cape coast. There he lived a remarkably simple life, growing his own vegetables, catching fish, riding his bicycle.

Although he was a fierce individualist, (one of the reasons he abhorred apartheid was that it was prescriptive) he was very convivial, and his house was a meeting place for writers, artists and even the occasional politician.

Chris Barron
Sunday Times, Sunday, 2 December 2001