Sic Parvis Magna
Thus from small things great things come
In that thyroid-storm of a ramble in which I named all the railway stations between Durban and Germiston in the 1960s, cf. Life Lines, I mentioned in passing the notion of usable pasts, quoting the example of Mooi River.
My mother was proud of her family history, which she could trace all the way back via her mother’s Plymouth heritage to Sir Francis Drake (c.1540 – 28 January 1596) the English explorer, sea captain, privateer and slave trader. If she knew about his privateering and slave trading exploits, she never mentioned them. The rest, not excluding his knighthood and his royal connections, was eminently usable.
The home on the Berea in Durban where she grew up had been named Drakesleigh by her mother, the magnificent Fanny Smith, née Kingwell. My mother, in turn, drew from the same provenance to name our family farm Drakesleigh when we moved to Rosetta in 1965. It turned out to be beautifully apposite.
A leigh is an open field or meadow cleared of trees. The vista that opened when my father cleared the trees to make the green sward of Drakesleigh’s front lawns revealed the slate-blue Drakensberg standing proud against the western sky. In our young imaginations the “Drake'' of the Drakensberg was named after our very own Sir Francis, which pleasing notion would endure long after we were told the feeble story that it derived from the Dutch draak, for dragon. The Afrikaners just didn’t know how to pronounce English words properly.
Which nicely demonstrates how, by turning yesterday’s lies into the truths of today, the past is always colonising the present.
My sister Helen had a horse named Sir Francis. It was a black, fat, lazy lump of a creature that ate a lot of turnips and couldn’t be urged into anything faster than a sluggish trot.
My mother was proud of Natal for voting against the Republic in 1961. She was proud of Durban for remaining so adamantly English. She was proud of her impressive collection of English novels from Fielding to Forster. She was proud of us for reading them, or pretending to. She was proud of her very English garden. She was proud of Rosetta for treating us every spring to the splendid display of wild pink roses that had apparently given the village its name.
I say apparently because the historical truth appears to have been rather too masculine, too exotic and too, well, British for her tastes, which toponymic tale had it that a soldier, returning to Natal after spending WWI defending the Suez Canal from foreign saboteurs, had named the village Rosetta because the Little Mooi River that runs through it reminded him of the Rosetta tributary of the Nile. We clung to our mother’s English version of the pink roses, which goes to prove once again that history is as much a matter of individual taste as it is of actual fact.
She was less proud of Mooi River, where she did her weekly shopping, even though it boasted most of the ingredients of a pleasant English country town set among the gently rolling hills and the sparkling streams of, say, Gloucestershire. It was populated largely with pleasant English-speaking people if you could see past the Afrikaners, the Zulus and the Asians. It had a golf course and a country club. Fat silver English trout likewise populated its eponymously beautiful river, and the environs of the town boasted a respectable number of horses.
It wasn’t only the awkwardness of Mooi River’s very un-English name that gave her pause. Even more egregiously it had no provenance to recommend it, and no heritage to speak of. It had no legends, no ghosts, no castles, no landmarks, no statues, and no history either famous or infamous. In short, it didn’t have a usable past.
So she was pleased, on those rare occasions when visitors arrived at the farm from remote and foreign places like Estcourt, Johannesburg or Overseas, to be able to tell them there was more to Mooi River than the Mobil and Caltex garages where you could stop for petrol, a palate-burning pasty or a pie on your way to Durban or on your way back to Joburg.
“Very few people appear to know this,” she would say. “But every single train that passes through Mooi River, whether northbound or southbound, whether the train-drivers like it or not, whether there are passengers embarking or disembarking or not, whether there are goods to offload in the middle of the day, or not a soul on the station platform in the depths of midnight…”
She paused to take a delicate sip from her crystal tumbler of cane and coke. The visitors raised their eyebrows and held their breaths. We sat on our footstools or in the wings of the window-seat and delighted in anticipating their amazement to come.
“You see,” she said, placing her glass very deliberately in the perfect centre of her Golden Hind coaster. “It was a clause in the agreement between the farmer who owned the land and South African Railways who wanted to build a station on it.
““You can have it, said the farmer, if every train stops at your Mooi River station, without exception, until the End of Time.”
“The railway bureaucrats hummed and hawed. They consulted their maps, their masters and their money-men. With not the faintest idea of its implications for generations to come, they decided at last it was a price worth paying. And with the solemnity of the barons who inked their names on the Magna Carta, they signed on the dotted line.”
The visitors nodded, but slowly and wisely, as though it would take a while for the gravity of what they had heard to sink and settle among the deepest shoals of their darkest thoughts.
She smiled, and picked up her tumbler. “Forever. In perpetuity…”
Then my father, his eyes shining as they always did in admiration of my mother’s beauty, eloquence and ineffable grace, would add, like an amen at the end of a benediction, “Until the cows come home.”
It wasn’t much of a story but - true or not - it served its purpose. It redeemed Mooi River from the tawdry reality of its present geographical and cultural insignificance by sprinkling it with a pinch of the gold dust of history, elevating it thusly into the realms of fable. She could place it then like an ornament alongside the Jubilee commemorative plates, her mother’s Victorian silver, the framed illustration of Drake’s Golden Hind, and her father’s discharge paper signed by George V commending his service and sacrifice after he had been wounded at the Battle of the Somme. It wouldn’t take pride of place, but it would be useful if required.
This is what was meant by the American literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, writing in the early 20th century, when he coined the phrase a usable past. Like all the other possessions we accumulate around us to affirm our identity, our status and our place in the world, a usable past is that well of history, tradition, legend and myth we can draw from when we need to refresh our faith in who we are, and reaffirm our sense of where we belong and among whom we belong.
In his influential 1918 essay, “On Creating a Usable Past”, Brooks railed against the American intellectual establishment and American critics for judging home-grown American literature by the foreign standards and alien criteria set by European and English precedent. An authentic American literature, in his view, would emerge only when American authors, readers and critics alike embraced a shared notion of the American historical experience — when they acknowledged, reflected and celebrated American history as different from, but not inferior to, the long-established traditions and tropes of European and English historical experience on the other side of the Atlantic — when they owned it in their writing, in their reading and in their reviewing. Only when it became usable, in other words, would America’s past become legitimate, relevant, and shareable in literature and life.
Brooks’s usable past had little to do with the sterile facts of history, and everything to do with the “creative impulses” evoked by the experience of them:
What is important for us? What, out of all the multifarious achievements and impulses and desires of the American literary mind, ought we to elect to remember? The more personally we answer this question, it seems to me, the more likely we are to get a vital order out of the anarchy of the present. For the impersonal way of answering it has been at least in part responsible for this anarchy, by severing the warm artery that ought to lead from the present back into the past. To approach our literature from the point of view not of the successful fact but of the creative impulse, is to throw it into an entirely new focus. What emerges then is the desire, the aspiration, the struggle, the tentative endeavour, and the appalling obstacles our life has placed before them. Which immediately casts over the spiritual history of America a significance that, for us, it has never had before.
A usable past has since come to mean many things to many people.
Joshua Cohen, author of the brilliantly funny and funnily brilliant novel The Netanyahus, describes it as the sum of our personal, cultural and national histories that we can use “...to give meaning to the present and direction for the future.”
The recorded history of the Jews predates the Bible by some eight or nine hundred years. It is eminently usable. American history was invented ex-nihilo in the early decades of the 20th century. Hollywood made it commercially usable. Very. The English have been inventing, revising and perfecting their history since 1066. The BBC won’t let us forget it. South Africa’s history goes back to either three million years BCE or to 1652 depending on whether you think of yourself as white, black or human.
In this respect Mooi River is a metonymic correlate of South Africa as a whole. Both their pasts are fractured, not shared. Their names are bi-white-lingual. Their histories are divided by race, religion and the legacies of apartheid, by slavery, colonisation, language, skin colour, geography and conflict. Their provenances are tribal, not collective. There are no myths to bind them, not gods to reconcile them, no fables to unite them. Neither has a remotely usable past unless it is written as a history of mutual suspicion, antipathy, victimhood, greed, violence, hatred and fear, the very opposite of Brooks’ dream of a creative impulse shared by a nation.
There was, of course, that brief moment in our collective history when we believed Mandela or his legacy would give “...meaning to our present and direction for the future.” It proved as illusory and as ephemeral as the notion of the rainbow we fondly believed would guide us to a future of multi-coloured harmony, goodwill and prosperity for all. When the mirage of it evaporated as instantly as spring rain on the baking tar of the N3 it was replaced by what my good friend Ian Glenn, the brilliant South African academic and historian, has described as Liberal Afro-Pessimism which, crudely put, is the hopelessness of hoping that one day either Africa or the world at large will ever give a damn about the what happens in Africa or to Africa.
Mandela and Invictus aside, we are no closer to writing a coherent and usable history of South Africa than we were before Sterkfontein where we accidentally fell out of the Cradle of Mankind. We are back where we began, a nation of solipsists, separated forever by history’s disgust, obliged to seek meaning, purpose and direction in meagre scrapings from the broken barrels of our individual biographies, desperate to affirm our identities by the scraps and shavings long ago buried under the cold dust of history’s indifference.
So we cling onto our names. We are the Torrs, the Smiths, the Leylands, the Kellys, the Marins, the Isteds. We must be the consequence of something of consequence. Somehow, sometime, we must once have meant something, done something, have been remembered for something.
Provenance is meaning, provenance is hope. In the scheme of who think we are and what think we are in the world, provenance is everything. Upon the smallest scraps of it we build the great towers of who we like to think we are. We search our genealogies and our ancestries. We rifle through the dusty drawers, the broken jewellery, the moth-eaten letters, the dedications and inscriptions in the old books among the bric-a-brac left behind by long dead grand-aunts and great-grand uncles among the rat droppings in wilting cardboard boxes beneath the twisted metal and crumbling rubber of broken bicycles in damp basements or gloomy garages where no one has ventured since 1957 in the hope of finding something, anything at all, that will lend a shred of significance to the hollow souls who stare back at us in the mirror every morning.
If all else fails we must, at least, have come from somewhere, from a town or a city or a country from which we can borrow the illusion that we were once part of something greater than our names and numbers. Based on nothing but a fanciful intuition that its history was written by poets rather than by bureaucrats, most of us white people hope it’s Ireland.
Or, like Fanny Kingwell, my mother, Mooi River, Sir Francis Drake and the America of Van Wyck Brooks, we can simply make it up.