Discussion with Mark Gevisser, Dinaw Mengestu and Ellah Allfrey

Writing about Africa is so often a political game that it is no coincidence that books by the continent’s most high-profile authors are imbued with political messages. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew famous through a novel set within the post-colonial breakdown of the Nigerian colonial state. Ngugi wa Thiongo writes vast satires on the corruption and engorgement of a Kenyan political elite, while radicals like Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera placed themselves at the centre of their work – inhabiting their own House of hunger, where the political injustices of segregated Zimbabwe are played out in the personal frustrations and failures of its people.   

Granta 114: Aliens showcases some fine writing by African writers (or writers of African origin) on very different African lives. Dinaw Mengestu and Mark Gevisser spoke at the Royal African Society and read from their Granta pieces, and Binyavanga Wainana also contributed to the edition with his piece One Day I Will Write About This Place.   

Both Mengestu and Gevisser have written pieces which are presumably substantially based on factual events. Mengestu assumed the pose of the considered traveller, though his chosen destination (the Eastern DRC), is unlikely to elicit a favourable report on the quality of its accommodation or ease of transport. Apart from a brief statement on the region’s ‘equatorial beauty’ this, as with Gevisser’s piece, is about people – complicated, ambiguous conflicts and relationships between Africans. Both writers recognise that they became part of the politics of the moment by inserting themselves into the events on which they report. This is, perhaps, what these pieces are all about. Being both The Participant and The Observer  forces us to confront the problematic question of whether an Observer  is ever simply that. At what point do we begin to participate in the story itself?  

In Mengestu’s case, his participation is multi-faceted. A model of the split national identities produced by the post-colonial era, Mengestu is both Ethiopian and American. However, we find him in They Always Come in the Night exploring a part of Africa of which he is not a ‘native’. Particularly striking is the author’s assertion early on that from his tall and fine boned Ethiopian appearance, he ‘could easily be mistaken for a Tutsi’ – the ethnic grouping who were the predominant victims of the 1994 Rwandan genocide – and whose population straddles the border with the DRC. Mengestu responds by describing a feeling of being ‘hunted’. It is strangely disquieting to observe that the identity politics of the region has the capacity to impact upon The Observer, irrespective of their actual birthplace.   

Whilst Mengestu operates as both the presumed local and the internationalised outsider, Gevisser inhabits an even more delicate space within the community of modern South Africa. His main ‘characters’ – the partially suppressed gay lovers observing the antics of the younger members of their sexual minority – share little with the author beyond their sexuality. Gevisser, a self-professed educated, middle class, gay writer (and serious commentator on the politics of post-Apartheid South Africa) skilfully teases out the course of their lives – from work and marriage to their early sexual experiences as gay men.   

Gevisser produces both a study of a complicated relationship between two men, and a delicate, underground history of apartheid South Africa interpreted through the lives of these two individuals. Iconic moments in the country’s history are incorporated into the narrative – the destruction of cosmopolitan Sophiatown in 1955 to make way for Triompf (a white neighbourhood), the current president’s internationally infamous polygamous lifestyle, and the manifest ‘atomising’ segregation of the country under white rule. Having lived through much of this himself, Gevisser is a participant in the historical process, albeit from a position much removed from that of his protagonists.   

It would be interesting to know whether Gevisser intends to make contemporary political points through his exploration of his country’s gay subculture. In the opening description of his own wedding to another man, he is chastised by an employee at the registry office for not making a fuss about his coming marriage: ‘Do you think you are a second-class citizen just because you are gay? You have full rights in this new South Africa. You have the right to make a fuss…”  Gevisser responds with barely concealed pride in his country – “There I was, an entirely empowered middle-class, middle-aged white man, being lectured by a young black woman about my rights.”  

I could not help but wonder whether Gevisser was seeking to make a positive assertion of the liberalism of the post-Apartheid era by presenting these voices from below. At a time when the popular reporting of the high politics of the ANC mostly focuses on the antics of Jacob Zuma or the rabble rousing of Julius Malema, is Gevisser stating that this liberal vision is still alive in the bedrock of the ordinary people of South Africa? If Gevisser is indeed making this statement, then he stands out more than ever as a participant in this piece. As with Mengestu, the politics of identity and place are exemplified in the life he is able to live and the lives he has chosen to document.

By Magnus Taylor

You may also be interested in...

Marc Epprecht - Heterosexual Africa? - notes from the struggle for sexual rights