Arts and Culture
Review: A Living Man from Africa
When South Africa’s history is told and re-told, standard narratives tend to overlook the peacemakers. It is, in a sense, anomalous that Nelson Mandela secured his place at the apex of the country’s political pantheon not through the radical rhetoric of his youth but through his role as a reconciliatory statesman; for hundreds of years prior to Madiba’s diplomacy, the role of the arbitrator, the go-between, was held in disdain by those committed to the path of either violent oppression or violent opposition.
From hensoppers (Boer fighters who surrendered to the British) to verraaiers, from non-striking “scabs” to so-called apartheid “collaborators”, the punishment has been severe: at worst, hanging or necklacing, but at best, ostracism and neglect.
This perhaps explains why almost nobody knows about Jan Tzatzoe. Born into the royal family of the amaNtinde tribe in 1792, at a young age Tzatzoe was given into the care of the missionary James Read. His light burned brightly but briefly in the early nineteenth century when – largely under the auspices of the London Missionary Society (LMS) – he acted as an intermediary between Xhosa chieftains and British colonial forces.
Unsurprisingly, the British failed to honour their promises to him. Although he maintained to the end of his life that “the war of words is the best war”, his pacifist stance lost him the respect he had previously gained amongst the Xhosa. Ultimately, like Chief Maqoma of the amaNgqika (who did fight back, and was imprisoned for it), he died lonely, landless and disillusioned.
Historian Roger Levine has undertaken to rejuvenate Tzatzoe’s reputation and to explore his legacy in A Living Man from Africa. The book’s title is taken from a speech Tzatzoe gave during a lengthy tour around the United Kingdom in the 1830s; by describing himself as “a living man from Africa”, Tzatzoe was emphasising his status as a representative of the dignity and merit of African people (as opposed to the exoticised, pseudo-anthropological “samples” that members of his audience may have seen paraded around the streets of British cities).
Yet paraded he was, albeit for different purposes – he was brought to Britain to vindicate the missionary project. In his speeches to Britons, Tzatzoe repeatedly referred to himself and his fellow-Africans as “children”, alluding to the Biblical notion that all Christians are “children of God” to underline his kinship and equality with members of his audiences. But, of course, this rhetoric also reinforced the paternalistic attitude of even the best-intentioned Englishmen and -women who supported the work of the LMS – who believed that Africans needed to be saved from themselves.
Moreover, although the LMS was strongly critical of British colonial abuses in South Africa, its own discourse of “salvation” was inevitably incorporated by advocates of imperialism into the argument that the imperial aim was one of spreading European civilisation (the exploitation of subject peoples and their lands being a convenient by-product).
Levine notes that Tzatzoe was a symbol used for different purposes by those in different ideological positions. Prominent members of the growing Eastern Cape settler population, for instance, denigrated his position of “secular” responsibility as a chief and distrusted his “spiritual” aims as a proselytiser. If he elicited this response, Tzatzoe could not have been a mere English toady. Indeed, he used the platform provided by the LMS to denounce colonial injustices.
Tzatzoe’s paradox is vividly presented in this book, the first in a new Yale University Press series which emphasises the “creative use of narrative”, and Levine has employed methods that are uncommon in historical non-fiction: present tense narration of past events, for instance, or the use of italics rather than quotation marks to indicate direct borrowing from source material, both of which contract the great distance between “then” and “now”.
Readers are also given more insight into the author than in most scholarly works. Levine tells us, as the book progresses, the story of his research (the scope of sources and materials patiently tracked down by him is impressive). This allows him to comment, in passing, on contemporary South Africa. Levine writes lyrically about his South African connection (he was born here but his family moved to the USA when he was a child). Sometimes this lyricism is too heavily infused into the prose; Levine’s fondness for figurative speech, and for extended metaphors in particular, runs the risk of bathos.
The book’s epilogue invokes the spectre of Steve Biko, who was born and buried in King William’s Town – a settlement whose history is intertwined with Tzatzoe’s life. The effect of this invocation is to offer a more ambitious interpretation of the title: that Tzatzoe’s legacy is still alive, not least because of his part in expanding the network of mission schools out of which the Eastern Cape black activist tradition grew.
Ultimately, whether or not readers agree with this concluding claim, they will no doubt concur with the author’s assertion that Tzatzoe’s story is also a reminder of “the extent to which the Cape Colony was imbricated in the international intellectual and political currents” of the early nineteenth century. In this way, it is fair to say that A Living Man from Africa tells the story of a not-insignificant figure in world history.
Comments (3)
And what if, say, Tzatzoe and Biko were one and the same man but alive at different times in Africa? Or, according to custom, they shared the same ancestral spirit or over-soul? Speak to the Ancestors, their invocation may be less ambitious but more telling...
Meanwhile Levine has written a fine narrative and you, in turn, another worthy review. Thank you.
A provocative suggestion - certainly, it works if applying the theory found in your novel KNOT OF STONE. But I prefer a "metaphorical" approach to reincarnation (if one is to use that term)! Thanks for the generous feedback.
Without wishing to labour the point, Chris, could I add that across the continent, from the Eastern Cape to West Africa, people believe the ancestors return to incarnate through their descendants. Whether we speak about this metaphorically or not, a living man is related to those who have gone before and to those not yet born to his family.
Thus describing himself as “a living man from Africa” Tzatzoe not only challenges Eurocentric perceptions of a static culture, but presents his people as dynamically linked to those that will see justice done in future—whether it be generations later or in another country—just as we've seen Biko, Mandela and Tutu do in our own time.
Among the amaXhosa the living head of a family or male chief is the one closest to the ancestors and so, in turn, he lends his leadership to their work. As a son of the amaNtinde royal household, Tzatzoe would certainly have been aware of his role, traditionally, and despite his conversion to Christianity, he knew the living were closer to the ancestral spirits than to any all-powerful god—albeit Thixo or Jehovah. Moreover, he knew the ancestors would only be reborn if we remembered them.
As a narrative, A LIVING MAN FROM AFRICA is itself an act of memory. What Levine most admirably does is to show how Tzatzoe struggled with his own disparate beliefs while trying to merge profoundly different cultures on the frontiers of history. In doing so Levine, like Tzatzoe, also positions Africans as agents of cultural and intellectual change in our world.
And to this end, your site plays its part here too.