As a young boy in Stellenbosch, Malvern Van Wyk Smith lived in the shadow of apartheid. Smith was 12 years old when the National Party came to power in 1948 and grew up within a school of racist thinking.
As a young boy in Stellenbosch, Malvern Van Wyk Smith lived in the shadow of apartheid. Smith was 12 years old when the National Party came to power in 1948 and grew up within a school of racist thinking.
But he refused to adhere to this school of thought and set out to find from where it had originated. The political climate, and Smith’s refusal to go with the flow, sparked a fire in his belly that would influence the rest of his academic career and eventually culminate in his book: The first Ethiopians: The Image of Africa and Africans in the early Mediterranean World, which was launched last Tuesday at Rhodes University.
As Professor Emeritus in the Rhodes University English Department, he always told his students, “If you cannot sum up what you’re doing in one sentence, you’re on the wrong track.”
Smith’s one sentence of what he aimed to achieve with is book is: “Were white South Africans uniquely contaminated with racist thinking, or was there a broader and deeper discourse of race and racism in and about Africa that needed to be explored and uncovered?”
So why did Smith not just go along with the status quo in ’48? “I don’t know. I was just given to asking questions.
I found such extraordinary assumptions just couldn’t be right, or acceptable.” After Smith completed his Honours degree in English at Stellenbosch University he taught for a year in Natal.
Smith obtained the prestigious Rhodes scholarship which sent him to Oxford University in 1960 where he met and married his wife, Rosemary, and spent the next four years of his life.
They spent two further years in America before returning to South Africa in 1966 to settle in Grahamstown and teach at Rhodes.
Smith says it became more and more impossible to accept conventional National Party ideology. “It became obvious to me that [apartheid was]impossible, immoral and illegal, and I became more intrigued by what it [racism]was about,” he says.
At Rhodes, where Smith was Head of Department from 1978 to 1996, he became more involved in teaching African and South African literature.
“One cannot read South African literature without realising it is all about race. Even now fiction circles around race, race relations, the tension and tragedies,” he says.
“People often ask why a professor of English writes a book about classics, anthropology, rock art,” says Smith, who doesn’t make a distinction between literature and other disciplines, because books are either interesting or not.
“You can’t read South African writing without being deeply enmeshed in debates about race.” What started out as a book about Victorian racism became infinitely more complex.
“It became obvious very quickly that 19th century racism was an end, a result, rather than the beginning of a racist school of thought.”
In his research Smith found that it was in fact the early Egyptians who most specifically started making very clear distinctions between themselves and the rest of Africa.
“This raised the important question of who were the Egyptians and where did they come from?” Smith found that pre-dynastic Egyptians were African, rather like the Khoisanoid (Smith’s term) people;
ancient inhabitants of Africa who disappeared with the Bantu migration of 3000 years ago. In the rock art he explored he found similar themes, ideas and iconography between early Egyptian art and Khoisan drawings.
This research took him on a journey into the domains of the Greeks, imperial Rome, the Bible and Christianity until he saw the seventh century Islamic conquest as a good place to stop.
Smith’s previous work includes Drummer Hodge: the Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War; Grounds of Contest: A Survey of South African Literature;
Shades of Adamastor: Africa and the Portuguese Connection: An Anthology of Poetry and other anthologies with among others work by the late Don MacLennan.
He says this work was inspired by his questions and ideas about racial discourse. So what is the message of this book?
Smith hopes his book will help people to better understand race, racism and race relations,to be aware of the terribly ingrained racist thinking in society in order to resist, even though it will not be easy.
Smith is sceptical about the sociological approach to racism which assumes that racism is an acquired action with no substance that can be eradicated if we put our minds to it.
He cites Julius Malema’s musical debut with “Kill the boers” as racism coming from another side. “I don’t know if we can solve racism”, he says, “but we haven’t done badly, we seem to be managing”.
So what is next for Prof Malvern Van Wyk Smith? “I think my main point has been made, writing a second book will just continue the argument.”
At the moment Smith enjoys sorting out his millions of photographs by making photo albums for his four children and seven grandchildren – another form of storytelling
