Book 7 of 54: "I Speak to the Silent" by Mtutuzeli Nyoka

About the author

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."

Book 3 of 54: "The Real Life of Domingos Javier" by José Luandino Vieira

About the aurthor:

Born in Portugal in 1935, José Luandino Vieira's parents immigrated to Angola in 1938. Vieira grew up immersed in the language and the culture of the black quarters of Luanda, Angola's capital. He was so influenced by these experiences that later in life he wrote in a language unique to the black quarters: a fusion of Kimbundu (one of Angola's native languages) and Portuguese.

Vieira devoted himself to Angolan independence from Portugal. In 1961, he revealed a secret list of deserters from the Portuguese army to the BBC and was arrested and imprisoned for eleven years. It's sad to think that so many Angolans gave their lives for the realization of Angola's independence in 1975 (which is what the book is about), only to have the country enter a civil war that only recently ended in 2002.


The Real Life of Domingos Xavier (Angola):


This was quite an interesting book. It was about a land so far away that I have not been to yet. A land I knew very little about (until recently); a land I never thought about before. But the connection I made to Angola through this book went deeper than I expected. The similarities to South Africa's history are so uncanny.

"The Real Life of Domingos Xavier" is an ode to all the freedom fighters who made the ultimate sacrifice for Angola's independence. Domingos Xavier represents freedom fighters who were detained by the authorities, tortured, violated and eventually killed. The colonial police come to Domingos Xavier's house and arrest him in the dead of night. The book lays bare Domingos Xavier's torture by the white Portuguese colonial police and the cipaios (Africans recruited to serve in subordinate roles in the colonial police). He is beaten to the point where his eyes become so swollen he is unable to see through them. His wife Maria is sent around by the authorities from one office to the next, each official claiming to have no knowledge of her husband's arrest. These portrayals of Domingos and Maria's torture are inter-spaced by the underground freedom fighters outside jail trying to identify the prisoner that was paraded in the township by the police to curb political dissident.

Vieira succeeded in making me feel a lot of suspense. I found myself telling the characters not to speak to loudly about what they were planning because you never know who is listening. In fact, on two or three occasions I found myself going back on a page to make sure no one was near the characters who might report them to the police. When a scene included the characters of Mussanda, Chico, Grandad Patelo and Young Zito, I would be on edge the entire time, fearing an arrest was imminent.

There is an incident in Domingos Xavier's torture where the white colonial police officer offers him a sandwich and a beer having subjected him to beatings on previous days. This incident made me thing back to a book I read last year: Jacob Dlamini's "Askari". This book was about (among other things) an examination of the circumstances that lead some freedom fighters during Apartheid in South Africa to betray and continue to betray many of their comrades.

I think this idea of betraying your people still happens today. Where you have political leaders choosing the lavish lifestyle that money and other benefits will afford them as a result of bribes and other corrupt actions. This can further be extended to ordinary Africans choosing to participate in a systems and institutions that continue to oppress us today, naively believing that if we work hard enough, we can carve a seat for ourselves at the table, not realizing that for every one of us that makes it in the corporate world (for example) there are millions of us that continue to live under these oppressive institutions that were never created for the improvement of our lives as black people.

Domingos Xavier still refuses to betray his people even after he is promised the sandwich and beer and his "freedom". How many of us continue to accept the sandwich and beer and a false sense of freedom just so we can live a more lavish lifestyle than the next person, while betraying our sisters and brothers in the process?