The war poems of Mongane Serote : The Night Keeps Winking and A Tough Tale

The war poems of Mongane Serote: The Night Keeps Winking and A Tough Tale For many South Africans who saw themselves as victims of a racist society, the twentieth century was a period of one hundred years of political turmoil and segregation. Representations of racism and the kinds of subjects it created were provided by various writers during specific historical periods. I consider the 1980s as a period in which the political conflict between the repressive white state and those who wanted change was largely undertaken through violence. This article therefore looks at the depiction o f violence in Mongane Serote’s poems of the 1980s The Night Keeps Winking (1982) and A Tough Tale (1987). As its title suggests, the article analyses these poems as “war poems”. It focuses on the political themes Serote develops in the poems. The N ight Keeps Winking (1982) and A Tough Tale (1987) offer horrifying images of war and the senseless bloodletting characteristic of South African life in the 1980s. These poems, as the article will show, reveal how people's lives were damaged by the apartheid state to the extent that many people resorted to violence as a method of liberation.


Introduction Mongane Serote published
The Night Keeps Winking in 1982 during his stay in Botswana as a refugee from South Africa, the country of his birth.It comprises poems arranged in three parts, "Time has run out", "The sun was falling" and "Listen, the baby cries and cries and cries".He published A Tough Tale in 1987 during the years he spent in London as cultural attaché of the African National Congress (ANC).I regard The The war poems of Mongane be rote: The Night Keeps winning ana a lougn iaie Night Keeps Winking (1982) and A Tough Tale (1987) as "war poems" because they depict the culture of war in South Africa in the 1980s.In these poems, Serote suggests that the oppressive white power structure is the main cause of violence and political conflict.By retelling the oppressive history of the past he justifies the strategies and tactics of the liberation struggle that had turned equally violent.Against this backdrop, I argue that the impetus of these poems is "the growth of the liberation movement within the country in the 1980s [which] intensified the political struggle" (Beinart, 1992:468).

A state of war
William Beinart (1992:482) upholds the view that in the 1980s South Africa was in a state of war.He identifies the government's "discourse of total strategy and the notion of the country being at war" as some of the major sources of violence at the time.In his view, the "total strategy" became a dominant instrument of political repression when the South African president, P.W. Botha, "incorporated the security apparatus more centrally in decision-making" (Beinart, 1992:482).Basing his findings on Alex Boraine's address to The Journal of Southern African Studies/ Oxford African Studies Conference on Political Violence, Beinart (1992: 482) observes: The security forces (but not them all) increasingly came to hold a conspiracy theory of politics which negated the idea of legitimate opposition.Over a considerable period of time, they were allowed great freedom and given protection against prosecution for excess.The police in particular, Boraine argued, thus developed a 'copculture' where internal professional constraints were increasingly eroded.A state of war in South Africa was also caused by acts of violence encouraged by the African National Congress (ANC).The ANC believed that a repressive state can only be defeated through a war of liberation.Albert Venter (1989:69) has noted that "during the 1984-87 'unrest' the ANC was actively involved in furthering the struggle against apartheid It sent in guerillas to actively participate in sabotage, bombings, laying of landmines in white rural areas, and assassinations".In this article, the term "war of liberation" denotes the national liberation struggle led by the ANC.It is "a war of the masses, a war of the people" (Guevara, 1969:50) "provoked initially by the conduct of the authorities" (1969:48).we walk days filled with peril I ask now as our rulers send small boys to kill our children to burn our homes to rape our wives, sisters and daughters I ask now while you are so wounded so bloodied in war what shall we do on that day?In this poem, the idea of the ever-looming danger of living in a repressive society is captured by the expression "days filled with peril".The disturbing air of violence and bloodshed is conveyed by the presence of "hippos and casspirs" -armoured vehicles.Serote identifies the repressive state as a major participant in the promotion of a war culture.It appears that his political intentions were to turn people against the apartheid state as shown in the way he retells the past and employs it to mobilise the oppressed people.

Remembering the past: memory as a weapon
In The Night Keeps Winking (1982) and A Tough Tale (1987) Serote evokes the past as a way of mobilising the oppressed masses.He uses the night and the moon as motifs to recreate the tragic history of the past wars of conquest in "Time has run out" (Serote, 1982:7-8).
The bright eye of the night keeps whispering and whispering the shadows form and unfold the night is silent with experience this night in these parts of the world remember once long ago it hid the arrow it hid the spear it hid the lethal hand which fought and threw spears against the night of guns and canons this night is silent with experience this night remember the ship in the 16th century remember the Portuguese remember the arrow the night saw it all.In this poem the personified night uses its "bright eye", the moon, to look on the past history of African people whose ancestors "threw spears" to resist white encroachment -"the night of guns and canons".Serote traces the origins of the violent nature of social relationships in South Africa by recalling the early phases of South Africa's colonisation.In this way, he suggests that the war culture of the 1980s has to be understood in a particular context and history.Serote explains this historical context in A Tough Tale (1987) in "a long story" about the painful past.In this poem he (Serote, 1987:7) interprets South Africa's past as a history of social divisions and conflict which made it difficult for people to understand each other: We page through each other's faces we read each looking eye.The proposition that Serote views his tale or "story" as a record of a painful history of political power struggles is supported by the following words from A Tough Tale (1987): "why does one want to tell such a gory tale?so that my friends, our past is not erased" (Serote, 1987:37).Seen in this light, a tale such as Serote's A Tough Tale (1987), in Stephen M. Finn's words, becomes a monument of "the past, the historical, the national memory, a major result being the equation of this with the misery and hardship of the present" (Finn, 1988:26).Therefore, it can be argued that A Tough Tale (1987) performs a political function similar to the one Bob Leshoai outlines in a discussion of the historical and political role of poetry written by Africans.He states that "one of the functions that poetry serves in traditional African life is to record and preserve, for the future, events of great importance in the nation ... It is a source of education and information to both young and old" (in Chapman, 1982:58).One of the major political events Serote uses as "a monument" to equate "the misery and hardship" of the past with the state of war in South Africa in the 1980s is the June 16 uprising.For example, in A Tough Tale (1987)  I smile for every day so many people in the world agree that our bloody battle is just, me I smile my friend for in my country through struggle, through great pain through knowledge the masses defend and built the ANC the workers defend and built Sactu the masses, the workers, the students, the learned defend and built the ANC, Sactu and the SACP with many painful days (Serote, 1987:47-48).By telling the history of the struggle, the war poems propagate the idea of the necessity of a war of liberation and call for "the mother of all wars" to end "the eight wars we fought/remember Bulhoek/Sharpeville/Soweto/ so many times" (Serote, 1982:12).Serote upholds the idea of a "just" war.He uses these poems to reveal the advantages of "our bloody battle" for "equality" (Serote, 1987:47).The impression he creates is that if people's frustrations and anger caused by political repression are not channelled, it will be difficult to correct criminal and anti-social behaviour, especially in the black communities.What makes his views on violence ambivalent is the fact that while he condones liberation violence, he also exposes the negative effects of violence on individuals and is "made nostalgic for peace" by "comrades pick[ing] up a gun from another who just fell" (Serote, 1987:46).

Concerning violence
In For instance, Serote says it is the exploited "blacks" who "toil" to enrich those whites for whom the "land/whose multi-colour wealth bloomed".In "Time has run out", in the tradition of the Black Consciousness philosophy, Serote (1982:13) uses the expression "it was criminal to be black" to show the stereotypes that are associated with blackness: this is our land it bears our blood it will bear our will this will an experience moulded by the inside of this long and dragging hour where it was criminal to be black where we toiled and starved where we were forever drafted to jail or hospital where we said we were human where the weight of the day left us sleepless at night In A Tough Tale (1987) Serote views black South African's life-world as a hostile social environment which aggravates the humiliation of the blacks.He uses images of coercion and social deprivation to capture "the pain of humiliation": we were thrown back to the township to the village and time, merciless an accomplice took our life here we are then we popped out of life to death having witnessed the worst unemployment jailed and diseased and impoverished until when the pain of humiliation like the pain of a raped woman throbbed and kept pace with our eye-wink (Serote, 1987:10).Serote uses the words "we were thrown back to the townships/to the village" to show some of the coercive measures employed by the government to undermine the humanity of black South Africans.These measures include forced removals from areas designated white in the early 1950s -a measure used by the white rulers to cram black people into overcrowded townships like Alexandra and the poverty-stricken homelands of Bophuthatswana, Transkei, Ciskei and Venda.The arbitra ry nature of the movement of black people, sanctioned by the Natives Resettlement Act of 1954, from areas like Sophiatown and Newclare to "the so-called black spots" (Chapman, 1989:185) like Meadowlands and Diepkloof, is expressed in words that suggest physical force and brutality: "thrown back", "merciless", "jailed" and "humiliated".Social de privation is implied in phrases such as "having witnessed the worst unemployment", "diseased and impoverished", and "the pain of humilia tion".I think where Mongane Serote depicts "the pain of humiliation" in fierce terms arousing pity and sympathy, leaving the reader agape and paralysed by disbelief in what the human race is capable of, is where he associates the treatment of black people by the apartheid state with the plight of a terrified and helpless woman in the hands of a band of rapists: "until when the pain of humiliation/like the pain of a raped woman/ throbbed and kept pace with our eye-wink".The pain of a person who has been raped is intensified by the pairing of the words "raped" and "woman" as if they express a particular human identity.I draw symbolic connections between a subjugated group of people and "a raped woman" because the latter phrase arouses a feeling that a violated woman loses her personality, self-worth and respect.She belongs, it appears from the harsh register of the phrase, "raped woman", to another sub-human category of woman.She is a woman, but a lesser form of a woman, a defiled and denigrated woman.Similarly, the fact that black South Africans were "thrown back to the township[s]" and "village[s]" used as labour reserves testifies to the violation of their human rights.In addition to the fact that they had no voting rights, black South Africans were disrespected and deprived of the right to determine the quality of their lives.It can also be argued that the white minority subjugated the oppressed by relating their lives to the negative connotations of the category "black".I think there are strong parallels between the discourse of race and the gender-based cultural assumptions of patriarchal societies.The latter societies use the notion of gender to categorise women as inferior objects of desire.This way, women are often abused by men who have been conditioned to think they are superior to women, just as indoctrina ted members of the white community "interpellate" (Althusser, 1971:160) blacks as sub-human beings, as "the negation of values" (Fanon, 1967a:32).Thus, the powerlessness of a "raped woman" in maledominated communities mirror the exploitation of blacks by whites.The horror of the two experiences, rape and racism, can be amplified when we relate it to the sense of being forcefully "mastered" (Yeats, "Leda and the Swan", line 13), penetrated, and "laid in that white rush" (line 7) conjured by the words subjugated and rape.Like William Butler Yeats's image of "the broken wall" (line 10) signifying the penetration of Leda by the invading Swan, these two words reverberate with connotations of possessing and taking control of persons by force (see Yeats, 1991:214-215).Serote uses the effects of violence described above to justify the liberation struggle.He regards a "national revolution" as the oppressed's logical and positive response to the violence of the South African state.In an ironic and sardonic tone, he dramatises the satisfaction felt by Reagan and Thatcher at having supported South Africa's acquisition of weapons of war used by the apartheid state to "mow down children, women and men" -"tear gas, rubber bullets, Hippos and casspirs".In A Tough Tale (1987) Reagan "smiles" and Thatcher "grins" when Botha's voice is heard callingtear gas, rubber bullets, Hippos and casspirs mow down children, women and men while Reagan smiles and Thatcher grins let them, the friendship presents they give the Boers are death makers for us ).Perhaps the word "wound" is chosen because, like "a tough tale" and the personified moon which looks on the deeds of humans below, it evokes painful memories of the historical past.The "wound" is a deeply-moving embodiment of the pain inflicted on Serote's people through political detentions, imprisonment, "persistent violence beyond the call of duty by the police" (Beinart, 1992:482), censorship, and other oppressive and repressive measures of the state.The significance of the symbolic "wound" of the poems of Mongane Serote is noted by Alex Levumo in a review of No Baby Must Weep (1975): "Serote embodies the past and all it contains in metaphors drawn from the flesh and the senses.The most important of these is that of the 'wound' that expresses all the particularities that history has impressed onto and into the narrator" (in Chapman, 1982:76).Related to the importance of "the wound" as a reminder of painful human experiences is the verb "mount" with its multiple connotations of resilience and a no-retreat attitude.Taken as a verb signifying an upward movement, "mount" conveys the idea that it is the tormented who must rise and heal their wounds by putting a radical end to the afflictions of political oppression."Mount" can also be taken as a battle-cry used to mobilise the deprived majority to take up arms and "fight" back.I have derived the notions of a battle and a fight from another meaning of the word "mount", that is, to mount or fix a gun into a firing position.The latter analysis of the image "to mount the wound and fight" is also relevant to the interpretation of A Tough Tale's call for retaliation and a declaration of a war for freedom and self-affirmation.In A Tough Tale (1987) We may as well remind the world that the South African regime is illegitimate; that while we are not surprised that it maintains itself through terrorism, we are not expecting too much when we expect everyone to be outraged.In human terms, this illegitimacy of the white parliament made white South Africans emissaries for the dehumanisation of blacks ... The only condition for blacks to become human was if they could live the slogan 'Freedom or Death'.This is the condition which characterises the lives of both black and white South Africans of the eighties.The notion of a war of liberation as a just war should be understood in the historical context of the 1980s, particularly in a time like now when many post-apartheid South Africans prefer dialogue and negotiations.By highlighting the efficacy of the liberation war, Serote's intention is not necessarily to create an impression that violence is a panacea for all political problems, but to say "the condition which characterise^] the lives of both black and white South Africans of the eighties" dictated violent forms of political contestation.

The war of liberation and the fruits of defiance
In The Night Keeps Winking (1982) and A Tough Tale (1987) Mongane Serote shows that a war of liberation can actually be waged and won even under a reign of terror.His war poems echo the liberators' bullets over Pretoria (the symbolic site of apartheid power) at a time when the national liberation struggle was demonised by the apartheid state.Thus, ideologically, they challenge the belief manufactured by the white government through legal, educational, cultural and other "ideological state apparatuses" (Althusser, 1971:169) that the armed struggle was immoral and "unchristian".It seems plausible that Serote's worldview has been strongly shaped by the ANC's philosophical and political orientation.To some degree his poems seek to propagate the ANC's strategy and the tactics of the national democratic revolution.When Serote wrote The Night Keeps Winking (1982) and A Tough Tale (1987) the ANC was still of the opinion, in Nelson Mandela's words, 'that as a result of government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and thus unless responsible leadership was given to canalize and control the feeling of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races / ne war poems ot Mongane Serote The Night Keeps Winking and A Tough Tale of this country which is not even produced by war" (Mandela, 1991:116-117).In "The Long Road", the second poem in "Listen, the baby cries and cries and cries", from The Night Keeps Winking (1982), Serote glorifies acts of sabotage whose long and resounding explosions come alive in the irregular and lengthened line that carries the war-flames from the kaleidoscopic "red, blue, green and yellow flames scream[ing]" high up "into the silent sky": today in orlando moroka boysens soekmekaar dube sasol durban power station new Canada red, blue, green and yellow flames scream to the silent sky (Serote, 1982:30).Serote uses poetry to convince the subjugated that it is better to challenge the repressive power structure and die if needs be for a noble and just cause than to be helplessly exterminated without putting up a fight.The no-retreat spirit of defiance he cultivates in the war poems is best reflected in the following words from "Time has run out": We must now claim our land, even if we die in the process.
's observations very useful because they shed light on the socio-political context in which Serote's poems are located.For example, in The Night Keeps Winking (1982) and A Tough Tale (1987of freedom, the negation of "the idea of legitimate opposition" and the resultant state of war.By so doing, he implicitly warns against the futility of a dictatorial or militaristic "theory of politics" that prohibits political dissension.In "Time has run out" from The Night Keeps Winking (1982) he uses gory images of blood "splashed and scattered on the streets" to paint a picture of the devastation caused by the apartheid state's vicious war on the oppressednature of violence and repression through a terrifying portrayal of bloodshed.In "Time has run out" the bloodletting of the 1980s is indicated by the "droplets of blood/splashed and scattered" everywhere, "on the streets" and "on [the] walls of houses".The effects of violence are also reflected by the allusion to Steve Biko's death at the hands of the South African security police.Biko's death is suggested by the image of blood "on floors of land-rovers".In A Tough Tale (1987) Serote depicts the 1980s as a volatile and precarious time.He captures the political violence that came to be associated with the South African repressive state in words that indict P.W. Botha: "Botha's voice is heard calling -/tear gas, rubber bullets/Hippos and casspirs" (Serote, 1987:28).Serote (1987:46) writes: The war poems of Mongane Serote: The Night Keeps Winking and A Tough T a le _______ The Night Keeps Winking (1982) and A Tough Tale (1987) have symbolic effects which can be related to Serote's attempt to reconstruct the past.In the title of The Night Keeps Winking, he uses the verb "wink" to personify the "night".The function of the night that is endowed with human qualities of sight, circumspection and vigilance, is to keep a watchful eye on circumstances in Serote's world.In this way, in its personified form, the ubiquitous and omniscient night embodies Serote's memory and recollections of the violent past.Taken as a whole, the title, The Night Keeps Winking (1982), symbolises a tragic tale of the events of the past used by Serote as a unifying factor.He exploits this documentation of the past as a technique of political organisation, politicisation and mass mobilisation.The latter proposition flows from my observation that Serote relates his role as an artist to the material conditions of his immediate social environment.For instance, he remarked in On the Horizon (1990): I was brought up in a community which had chosen to fight against oppression and exploitation: to have taken an opposite position would have been to sell out.I had made a choice to use writing as a means of communication among people, and as a writer who was part and parcel of the struggle, my writing became a weapon (Serote, 1990:111-112).It is therefore not surprising to hear him in "Once More: The Distance", the first poem in "Listen, the baby cries and cries and cries", from The Night Keeps Winking (1982) echoing the heart-rending experiences of a people scarred by a history of racism, social deprivation, repression and violence.In this poem Serote uses the suggestion that "today comes from a past yesterday" to unite the African people.He relates the political situation of the 1980s to the political problems of the past.This history, connoted by "the footprints of that past yesterday", Serote associates with cruelty and "the native reserves" where many people starved.He writes in "Once More: The Distance": you shall remember -because memory, unlike the eye, knows no sleepthat today comes from a past yesterday, the footprints of that past yesterday like the wind The war poems of Mongane Serote: The Night Keeps winking ana A Tough Tale A Tough Tale (1987) also symbolises the retelling of livedexperiences of Serote's people.These experiences are encapsulated in the word "tale".In Serote's thinking, a "tale" bears testimony to the atrocities and gross human rights violations committed by the white power structure, in the main, against the oppressed people.I choose to qualify the last utterance with the words "in the main" because recent work of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission suggests that both the abusers and the abused were affected by the evils of the past.As I will show below, this view has a bearing on Serote's ambivalent attitude to violence.
's war culture by adding to the list of martyrs, fallen heroes of the freedom struggle, notably Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Hector Peterson and Solomon Mahlangu -icons of their historical times.He takes this idea further by glorifying working class struggles and the resistance war led by the ANC.For example, at the end of A Tough Tale (1982), to use Craig Smith's explanation of the political function of Sembene Ousmane's God' s Bits o f Wood, Serote reminds us of "the sacrifices made by workers and political activists, of their strength, and especially of their self-taught radicalism" (Smith, 1993:52).Serote writes: The Wretched o f the Earth Frantz Fanon analyses the devastating anger of black people often produced by decades of political oppression and social deprivation.He describes the misdirected self-destructive rage of members of marginalised communities in the following words: The native's muscular tension finds outlet regularly in bloodthirsty explosions -in tribal warfare, in feuds between sects and in quarrels between individuals.Where individuals are concerned, a positive negation of common sense is evident.While the settler or the policeman has the right the live-long day to strike the native, to insult him and to make him crawl to them, you will see the native reaching for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native: for the last resort for the native is to defend his personality vis-a-vis his brother (Fanon, 1967a:42).Fanon's theorisation of the impact of the racialisation of human relations on individuals is very relevant to the situation Serote describes in he seems to exaggerate the psychological problems of the oppressed, the aggression signified by "the native reaching for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native' ' is also captured by Serote.In The Night Keeps Winking (1982) Serote highlights the self-hatred that turns the oppressed people against themselves through various forms of self-destructive violence.In "Time has run out" he identifies alcohol abuse, life-threatening abortions, township violence and the senseless slaying of fellow blacks as examples of this type of violence: inside this hour many of us have gone mad some killed with their bare fingers some soaked their hearts in alcohol some tore their wombs with their nails rather than give birth in oppression alas we did amazing things to say simple things we are human and this is our land (Serote, 1982:13).According to Serote this self-hatred and the accompanying self destructive tendencies indicated by the killing of one's fellow people at times "with knives" (Serote, 1987:10) emanate from the denigrating humiliation experienced by the majority of black people because of what Fanon (1967b) dubbed "the fact of blackness" in Black Skin, White Masks.
, having recorded the crimes of the apartheid state machinery, Serote underscores the need to retaliate in words that strongly echo Fanon's idea of the cathartic nature of revolutionary violence.Guided by an impassioned conviction, born of the hard struggle against tyranny and political subjection, that the "oppressors are as stubborn as the back of a tortoise/ that exploiters are as jumpy and as tricky as a flea" political oppression is a violent phenomenon giving rise to the counter-violence of the oppressed is at the core of Frantz Fanon's critique of colonialism in The Wretched o f the Earth (1967).Oppression, in Fanon's view, is "violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence" (1967a:48).His argument that it is the violence of the oppressing nation that breeds the counter-violence of the oppressed nation runs in the following terms: During the struggle for freedom ... the native's back is to the wall, the knife is at his throat (or, more precisely, the electrode at his genitals) ... After centuries of unreality, after having wallowed in the most outlandish phantoms, at long last the native, gun in hand, stands face to face with the only forces which contend for his life -the forces of colonialism (Fanon, 1967a:45).The Fanonist conception of the nature of violence was echoed some three years after the publication of The Wretched o f the Earth by Nelson Mandela who made the following response to the charges of sabotage brought against him and other leaders of the African National Congress in the early 1960s: I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage.I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence.I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people by the whites (Mandela, 1991:116).In "Freedom or Death: A Cultural Expression", an essay "prepared initially for the Festival and Conference of South Africa, Amsterdam, 1987" (Serote, 1990:60-64), Serote accounts for the hard-line position he also adopts in his war poems concerning violence in times of the warring of the "exploiter" (Serote, 1987:47) and the exploited in the following words.
Tale (1987) the need to intensify "the defence for a country" is symbolised by a popular slogan of the 1980s -"Freedom or Death".This slogan was often heard at political gatherings in the townships and mostly chanted as a war-cry by the youth at funeral ceremonies of victims of state repression.In an echo of the "Freedom or Death" slogan Serote urges the oppressed people to surge forward even under the reign poems, The Night Keeps Winking (1982) and A Tough Tale (1987), Serote espouses the view that in the face of brutal repressions and racial segregation, it is only "through struggle, through great pain" (Serote, 1987:48), that the marginalised can harvest the fruits of equality -"a firm foundation for progress" (Serote, 1987:48).6.Conclusion WithThe Night Keeps Winking (1982) and A Tough Tale (1987) Mongane Serote has offered an analysis of racism and its effects on social relations.Through a portrayal of the 1980s state of war in South Africa, he has illustrated the political strife and the disrespect for human lives produced by the use of violence to achieve political objectives.The Night Keeps Winking (1982) and A Tough Tale (1987) show the pitfalls of totalitarianism and political repression.At an ideological level they con test the opinion that the liberation struggle in South Africa was immoral and therefore responsible for the country's instability.By stressing what can be achieved by people who are united by a common goal The Night Literator 21(3) Nov. 2000:91-108 ISSN 0258-2279