This article was first published in the Cambridge Evening News on 4 September 1971.
Profile: Tom Sharpe by Deryck Harvey
AFTER spending 10 years in South Africa, Tom Sharpe, now a lecturer at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, proved such an embarrassment to the government there that he was deported. But his memories have proved too coruscating for him to forget. He has written some of them into his first novel, “Riotous Assembly,” which has become a best-seller.
“Nothing you can say about South Africa is an exaggeration,” said Mr. Sharpe, 43, a tall, personable man, with a bristling yet undaunting intellect, in a study at his home, 33 Highfield Avenue, Cambridge.
The son of a Unitarian minister in London, he went there after National Service in the Royal Marines and reading for a history degree at Pembroke College.
“My mother’s South African,” he explained, “although she was born in Australia. She moved to South Africa at an early age. And when I went down from Cambridge, I got to know quite a few South Africans.”
Social worker
He emigrated, he admits, in total innocence. “I had no idea of what conditions would be. Like most people in those days, I didn’t have any ideas of my own at all. I went and got a job for about three months with a finance company.”
He showed no aptitude for finance, however, and he was appointed by the European Affairs Department as a social worker among coloured people.
It was now that Mr. Sharpe began to realise the failings of an official regime in which a minority of privileged Europeans dictated conditions to a vast majority of native Africans.
“On the one hand,” he said, “all the friends I had in Cambridge turned out to be millionaires’ sons, and in the evening I was swimming in floodlit pools.
The only man
“During the daytime, my job was to visit 70 coloureds dying of T.B. Because I was the only man in this department, which was run by four heroic women, they gave me the worst areas, which was reasonable.
“Ghastly. I went out to South Africa without an idea in my head, just a mild idealism of the English-Cambridge sort. I couldn’t get over the disparity of the standards of living of the whites and the appalling squalor.
“What was disgusting about it was that it was unnecessary. South Africa is an immensely wealthy country. The industrial potential could support 200 million people. There are 20 million living there.”
His calls took him to some of the worst slums in the most depressed areas.
“I took food parcels once a week, and said: ‘Are you still alive, Mrs. — ?’ If she was still alive, she said, ‘Yes.’
“I remember a white man saying: ‘Oh, well, TB’s probably going to be the saving grace of the white people out here, you know. It will kill all the Africans off.’
Numbed by the misery he saw, and which he has never forgotten, he left the department after a year.
“I went teaching, down in Natal. I taught down there for the next six years, and then I became interested in photography – and this renewed my contact with the appalling squalor.
“You can live in South Africa, you know, without knowing that any of this is going on.”
Treason trials
Desperately keen on photography, he got to know Alan Paton well; he covered the treason trials; he did a photo-story on Lutuli.
“Through the camera, I became basically aware again. By this time I had got fed up with teaching, especially in South Africa, where education was Victorian.”
He set up a photographic studio in Maritzburg, and although he covered rather more weddings than he likes to think about, he was also in a position to photograph South Africa as he found it.
“I’ve now got 6,000 negatives. I had 35,000 negatives burnt, and others confiscated.”
And all the time he was writing, something he had always wanted to do. He sent a play, “The South African,” to the Royal Court Theatre, in London, and it was eventually staged by the Questors Theatre, Ealing.
“It was a very serious sort of play, and the next thing I knew, the Special Branch descended on me and raided my studio and my house.”
Writ for £10,000
“They kept it up for the next six months. They’re very shrewd people, but their purpose is to drive people out. I wasn’t prepared to be driven. I considered myself to be a bona fide South African who had lived there for 10 years.”
“The local Maritzburg-Natal Afrikaans paper published an article about me, in which they said I was a damned liar, and I had been sending abroad articles about South Africa which were lies.
“First of all, I hadn’t sent a single article abroad. The article was written by a Durban of whom I had never heard.
“The long and short of it was my lawyer said I had a clear-cut case of defamation of character. I slapped a writ on them for £10,000. But it was like cutting your throat in South Africa. They settled it out of court after I had been deported.”
He received a “strangely outdated” deportation order.
After his play had been staged in London, he lost a schoolteaching position in Maritzburg.
“I’ve had a lot of trouble with Mr. Vorster. But I wasn’t prepared to go. They gave me 10 days to get out of the country. I waited until the ninth day, and then I applied to the courts—that held them up for another 10 days.
Bleak prison
“The courts turned down my application, and another writ arrived. On the ninth day, I went to the appeal court, but they turned it down, too, I got another writ, and this time there was nothing I could do about it.
“They arrested me, and put me in there (pointing to a photograph of a bleak-looking prison framed on his study wall) and I did a small tour of South Africa prisons.
“I knew I was coming out, and so I found it extremely interesting from the point of view of someone who was going to write about it.
“I was very lucky to be thrown out when I was. After that, of course, it really got unpleasant. They put people in prison for 90 days, a hundred days, and the rest of it.”
He returned to Cambridge, where he has been teaching at the Tech for eight years.
“Deported, I hadn’t a bean in the world. I’d lost everything I’d got. I came back and did a Dip. Ed. in Cambridge, and I asked to do my teaching practice at the Cambridge Tech.”
He was living in a bachelor flat in Mill Road when he met his wife, Nancy, an American from North Carolina, and they decided to get married.
Film script
He was still broke. “While she went home to settle her affairs, I wrote my book, 105,000 words in three weeks, in longhand.” He sold it for the highest price paid for a novel in London for four years.
It was published as “Riotous Assembly” by Secker (£1.80) on May 11, and it has been in the best-selling lists ever since.
And Mr. Sharpe has now taken a year off from the college in order to fulfil a commission in writing the film script.
Mr. Sharpe has settled in Cambridge now, with his wife, step-daughter Melanie, aged six, and daughter Grace, 10-months.
But turbulent South Africa will always remain a part of his consciousness.
“People don’t realise how the English hated as the English,” he says. “The Boer War was won in 1961, when South Africa got a republic.”
He intends to write another book this year, just as quickly, and just as deeply. He is as committed now as he was always committed, and he is rather a happy man in having found his métier.
Caption under photo:
Mr. Sharpe: “These (South African) politicians are thick.”