This article was published in the The Daily Telegraph on 20 September 1991.
Tom Sharpe, savage satirist of apartheid, has just returned to South Africa 30 years after being expelled. Adam Low talks to him in Cape Town
AMONG Tom Sharpe’s predecessors at his public school, Lancing, were Evelyn Waugh and Trevor Huddleston. As a satirist he resembles Waugh in obvious respects, but as a young man he had more in common with Huddleston, the radical priest and father of resistance to apartheid.
In 1951, at the age of 23, Sharpe emigrated to South Africa, his maternal homeland, and found a job in the Non-European Welfare Department. Ten years later he was deported for writing plays of an “offensive” nature and other undesirable activities. Last month he landed back in the country for the first time in 30 years.
Talking in the luxurious surroundings of a hotel in one of Cape Town’s most affluent white suburbs he recalled his last accommodation in South Africa — the Roeland Street jail: “I shared a cell with a car thief, a man who abducted a young girl, and two murderers. Luckily I was deported before they started torturing whites — otherwise I’d probably still be here. I’m a terrible coward.”
Back in England he was horrified to be treated “like some sort of hero” and angered by the moral superiority of people’s attitudes to South Africa. His resentment at being cast in a role he didn’t deserve led to a very un-English outburst when two “extremely nice liberal ladies” asked him about his brief incarceration: “I said I was locked up with two murderers. ‘Murderers!’ they said. ‘How dreadful!’ So I said ‘Oh, but they weren’t really murderers — they only killed a kaffir.’”
In a moment of anger he had unwittingly spoken in the voice of the “ordinary Afrikaner”, and this gift for ventriloquism led to the creation of the first in a now notorious string of comic characters — Commandant van Heerden, incompetent head of the Pietermaritzburg police — the hero, or anti-hero, of Riotous Assembly (1971) and Indecent Exposure (1973).
No one should doubt the effect South African politics in the 1950s had on Sharpe. Riotous Assembly, born from witnessing the events of that decade, stands head and shoulders above his later, clumsier satires (Porterhouse Blue, Wilt and The Wilt Alternative) on British targets.
Wasn’t making a joke out of apartheid rather than bad taste? “I was sick of reading all these books written from the point of view of liberal white consciousness,” he said. “They were by middle-class people who were very comfortable and felt terrible about apartheid. They didn’t represent the vast majority. A copper from Pietermaritzburg, who isn’t considered a man until he has caught the pox three times from a black woman, lives in a very different world from anything Nadine Gordimer is writing about.”
Fed-up with the bleeding-heart nature of liberal white literature, Sharpe turned to satire as a means of writing “from the underbelly about how it really is down there”. In Johannesburg his job had taken him into black townships like Sophiatown and Newclare. “I saw one sergeant who was sjamboking every black person within reach. Suddenly he reached for his gun and shot twice — at a 45-year-old woman and her 16-year-old son who were walking down a lane. They were just shot dead. With no compunction whatsoever. He shot them because they were there, because they were black, because they were a target and he had a gun. They weren’t people to him, they were kaffirs — and that’s what my books were about. There are no blacks in them except as objects. They’re things you shoot. They’re tortured or run over. They don’t speak.”
Both the early books contain dedications to “the South African Police, whose lives are dedicated to the preservation of Western Civilisation”.
What would van Heerden make of the changes that have taken place in the last 18 months? “He’s an entirely fictional character who has no reality outside my imagination — but I’ve tried to speak to ordinary people, including Afrikaners like him, and there is a sense of helplessness. Their general reaction seems to be ‘We don’t like what’s happening but we don’t know what to do.’ I haven’t been to Venterstorp [the stronghold of the Right-wing Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB)] — but most whites don’t live in such places, they live in the cities. They don’t want the AWB. They want to survive commercially.”
What does he think of Afrikaners? “I had a great admiration for them as they were before the Nationalists came to power. They’d stood up to this bloody great empire and very nearly won. I still admire certain qualities in them. They overcame the English, but they perfected the system the English had begun and proceeded to put the country back 40 years. This country today is as it should have been in 1948.”
What sort of changes has he noticed since he’s been back? “What is quite extraordinary is that the signs — I mean literally the signs which said ‘Slegs Blankes’ (Whites Only) — have been removed. It’s wonderful to see. On the other hand the poverty that apartheid sought to perpetuate is still very much there. Poverty is palpable everywhere.”
Does he think that sanctions should be lifted? “In so far as things are changing in this country, and I think they are, then this change should be rewarded. The damage that has already been done is absolutely enormous. What struck me most was the cars. When I left they were all American. Now what do you see? The only countries who didn’t give a toss about sanctions were the Germans and the Japanese — you can put that in your paper.”
Did he ever expect to see this political transformation? “No. But I never believed that apartheid was going to last. The whole bloody thing was bonkers, and it drove me absolutely up the wall — the sheer stupidity of the thing. Just the expense of it. Think of all the paint they wasted just painting all those bloody signs!”
During a brief incarceration as a photo-journalist in the 1950s, Sharpe met a number of political figures, including the leaders of the ANC. Had he spoken to any politicians during his return? “They asked me if I wanted to meet de Klerk. Me? De Klerk is a very busy man — what the hell would he want to talk to a novelist for? I was asked if I’d like to meet Mandela, I said no, not really.”
Does he admire Mandela? “Up to a point, Lord Copper. I think he’s done some very stupid things and put himself in a very difficult position. I think he should look into his own backyard. He clearly has a great deal of personal charisma — a black man who could earn the respect of the shits they had on Robben Island, well, he’s got to have something. What worries me is that 40 per cent of the ANC are now SACP [South African Communist Party] — and it’s not as if these people are idealistic Communists. They defended Stalin and Brezhnev and now suddenly they turn round and say ‘What we need is democratic socialism.’”
Does he smell a rat? “I smell corpses of rats.”
Would he consider returning to South Africa, perhaps even to live? “I said when I got chucked out that I would return. Nowadays you live all over the place. I might come out here for half the year, or even retire here. I never believed in the bloodbath theory — and you’ve got to put your money where your mouth is, for God’s sake.”
Photo captions:
Tom Sharpe: anger at moral superiority towards South Africa
Riot police in action: Sharpe’s books contain ironic dedications to the police force