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by Njabulo Ndebele
Picador Africa

reviewed by Ben Oswest

I fear that because of a silly error on my part, a legion South Africans will now think less of Ernest Hemingway. How, precisely, have I impugned Papa Doc’s reputation? By suggesting in print - to the heart-clutching horror of a few people at the Sunday Times - that he singled out Tom Sawyer as the father of American literature. Any fool can tell you it was Huck Finn. How on Earth could anyone choose Tom Sawyer over Huck Finn - ? Answer: no one could, would, or, in fact, did. I actually knew this - spotted the error myself, in fact, after the fact - but for some reason I didn’t write it.

My only defense is haste in composition - I was due to leave town shortly after finishing the piece - and the fact that I was seeking a suitable comparison for Njabulo Ndebele’s brilliant collection of short fiction. Long may Fools remain in print. And short may my Sunday Times jinx with names remain in good health.

Here’s the original piece, whittled down for newsprint, with the glaring error:

• Fools & Other Stories by Njabulo Ndebele, reviewed by Ben Oswest

And here’s the original piece in full, error fixed:

If Hemingway was right, and a single book can father a nation’s literature, then Fools & Other Stories is South Africa’s Huckleberry Finn. This is the masterwork of South African fiction, notwithstanding the efforts of Nobel Prize winners and other contenders. Small in scope – its stories never leave the confines of Charterston township, attached to Nigel, south-east of Johannesburg – it is yet prodigiously generative, anticipating all the steps and stumbles, great and small, that attend a society on unsteady ground, lurching toward the brink of disequilibrium, pulling back, heaving forward, stampeding in retreat.

• Purchase a copy of Fools & Other Stories.

First published in 1983, Fools comprises five stories and the title novella. In the stories, the world of children reigns. The joy of being at liberty on the streets is packed tightly alongside the dread of conflict with older, stronger children, as well as the heavy bafflement induced by living under the caprice of adults. The narratives function on any number of levels: as social-realist descriptions of young human life; as parables, for when the children learn something – for instance, that ‘being involved’ is the key to forgetting hardship – it is a universal lesson; and as judgements against hypocrisy from on high. When the children aren’t suffered, as per the Biblical injunction, Ndebele’s wrath against the world of parents is towering.

Individually, the stories aren’t perfect. ‘The Music of the Violin’, in which young Vuka is humiliated by his mother’s bourgeois aspirations, is heavy-handed in its condemnation of her grasping at Western straws. ‘Uncle’, meanwhile, was left unpolished in several places, although the voice of Uncle Lovington’s nephew, who narrates, is so plaintively appealing that we are bound to indulge the overall effort. Taken together, however, the stories represent an astonishing achievement: in sum, they are a muscular, flexible, living allegory on sin and forgiveness, foolishness and wisdom, that makes for profoundly pleasurable reading.

Following the stories is ‘Fools’, which lends its title to the collection, and occupies almost half the book. Nineteenth-century Russia – Turgenev in particular – haunts this exceptional work, concerned with a teacher fallen into disgrace who is groping for the path to redemption. (Sound familiar? Indeed Fools anticipates Coetzee’s Disgrace in more ways than one.) For the first time, we are squarely in the realm of adults. Teacher Zamani’s tormenter, Zani, is the kinsman of Turgenev’s Bazarov, the young idealist-cum-revolutionary who causes consternation among the elders. Zamani and Zani meet at a train station on 30 November 1966 – fifty years ago. But the comedy of the scene is so galvanizing that the encounter remains timeless. It could have happened yesterday.

As could have the chain of events that follows. In truth, Teacher Zamani is an adult who has failed to grow up, and so remains burdened, like a child, by the crushing ambiguity that surrounds action in the present instant. Rebellion dances with collaboration, and acceptance with denial, deep in his heart. Zamani is presented as the fool of Fools – but this, naturally, is a frame-up. He may be foolish, but at least he knows it. By Ndebele’s reckoning, the true fools are those who lack even that basic understanding, who hear no voice of self-doubt, no matter how small. The people – adults – who won’t recognize how dependant their lives are on lies and injustice, they are the true fools.

The conclusion of Teacher Zamani’s story is ingenious. Ndebele has played, until then, with reverie and dream to superb effect, so that the final contest represents a jerk back into the world. These and other pages in Fools release showers of sparks of recognition, illuminating familiar moments in life, art and numberless other books. It is difficult to do justice to Ndebele’s piece de resistance, other than to affirm it as the progenitor of modern sensibility in South African letters. Like the Bible, it will outlive its various covers (this one’s particularly unfortunate: a desolate train station for a book full of life? a sign in French for a setting south of Brakpan?); and like Huck Finn its sweetness is the sweetness of the marrow.

• Purchase a copy of Fools & Other Stories.

Cat: The Review

Tags: Ben Oswest, Charterston, Disgrace, Ernest Hemingway, Fool & Other Stories, Fools, Huckleberry Finn, JM Coetzee, Mark Twain, Nigel, Njabulo Ndebele, Picador, Short Fiction, Short Stories, South African Literature, Sunday Times, The Review, Tom Sawyer, Turgenev

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006.