Mtutuzeli Nyoka was born in 1960 to a black medical doctor father (a rarity in Apartheid South Africa) and nursing sister mother. He grew up in Port Elizabeth and was an excellent athlete. He played cricket, rugby and soccer.
Nyoka went on to study medicine and in 1993 became the first black otolaryngologist (ear, nose and throat) surgeon in South Africa.
I Speak to the Silent is Nyoka's first novel. He started writing it in 1998 as a way to deal with the atrocities he had witnessed and experienced in Apartheid South Africa in the 70's and 80's. Snippets of his life are contained in his second book, Deliberate Concealment: An Insider's Account of Cricket South Africa and the IPL Bonus Saga, which deals about his time as a cricket administrator and his fight against corruption in Cricket SA and the sport in general.
I Speak to the Silent (South Africa):
I finished this book about two months ago but I have been struggling to write about it. I think it is because it is a book about South Africa: her past, her present, her future and how they are all so interconnected. This book touches on so many experiences (most of which are very painful) I have lived personally and through others and so it has been difficult to sit down and reflect on these.
I Speak to the Silent tells the truly tragic story of Walter Hambile Kondile, a self-described "simple man, a Xhosa and an African, whose life is of no significance to the world." Kondile was born and raised in Apartheid South Africa to be a "good native" and to believe that "it was God's design for the white man to rule over" him.
He is an obedient servant to his English master and tries his very best to teach his daughter, Sindiswa, to be subservient and to know her place. He fails at this: his daughter becomes a committed struggle activist who joins the armed struggle.
Kondile's life gets turned on its head when his daughter flees the police because she has become a vocal leader who is good at organising the masses. The events of the book unfold so that Kondile goes looking for Sindiswa in exile and discovers that his daughter's dreams and aspirations for freedom have been betrayed in unimaginable ways.
I found out about this book from Prof Pumla Dineo Gqola's seminal work Rape: A South African Nightmare in a chapter where she discusses violent displays of masculinity and how they cultivate the conditions for rape culture in South Africa. Gqola notes that one of the things that this novel shows us is that to undermine and undo rape culture, men have to "break ranks with patriarchy" and challenge its conventions and police the patriarchal privilege that we as men enjoy.
Perhaps one of the reasons rape is so prevalent in South Africa is because of our violent past and our inability as a society to deal with "rape histories, entanglements and violent masculinities." I Speak to the Silent is one of very few works that attempts to do this.
In October this year, an article appeared in the Mail & Guardian newspaper about women freedom fighters telling their experiences of sexual abuse in training camps like that of the African National Congress's (ANC) armed wing, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK). The men that committed these acts of violence never accounted for their crimes and went on to become some of the most powerful men in democratic South Africa.
When I was watching the announcement of the new leadership of the ANC recently, I could not help but think back to the crimes that the outgoing and incoming ANC presidents committed before they were elected in a democratic South Africa. Neither one of them have accounted for these crimes and both became the most important political figure in South Africa. This saddens me deeply.
In Nyoka's novel, Kondile reminds us that "it is a truism that the suppression of the truth, or of dissenting views, does not mean that they cease to exist. Their suppression merely creates a facade of compliance, a false sense of calm, which will from time to time be violently disrupted as the indestructible desire for liberty asserts itself."
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