The Ink of Anguish

An Opinion on Rage and Love by Chris Waldburger

Some books demand to be reviewed, but for me, it's the ones that might slip under the radar that first need attention. In the context of the significant changes of the past four years, every writer faces a choice: confront the lies and myths head-on or turn a blind eye and try to celebrate what endures. This bold book attempts to do both with a clear, emphatic rage. However, this rage does not stand alone, but is a product of the deepest love, the two being inseparable, two sides of one coin.

The author admits that in his subtitle ‘A Memoir of White South Africa in an Age of Destruction.’ From the off, I recognise a fellow countryman, laying it down, bare-boned. We South Africans have this habit of exposing ourselves. Others find us easy to target. ‘White South Africa’ puts a circle on our back. Making us easy to shoot, and with all the guns raised, what escapes attention is the underlying mockery. Go ahead. Triumph if you want to. I will survive. I know who I am and what I think, and I need no endorsement from anybody.

It is probably why we attracted so much vilification, refusing to die, refusing to submit, not even asking for independence, but taking it.  Black South Africa is eulogised and can do no wrong. Yet we, white and black together, know what others cannot: the country’s call, its searing conflicts bind us all, embrace us all, and no matter how deep our political differences, it endures, it dominates.

It is why The Truth and Reconciliation Commission worked and why South Africa is now the first to condemn the Israeli genocide. To great applause! Redeemed by the very rich Cyril Ramaphosa, still basking in the reflected glow of Mandela. But the ostracisation of White South Africa creates something like chaff on the margins. It blows about and gathers against any fences, and as the author puts it, that chaff accounts for the instantaneous atunement between us.

‘… there is an ease we have with each other, which is not simply a lack of violence, but a sense of sharing in life’s comedy and tragedy, an ease with the irony of existence that others do not seem to have.’

That ease has been absent from my own life ever since I left sixty years ago. It is not found in Britain or Europe, and it is why I fell upon this book, and read it in a single, uninterrupted day of nostalgic remembrance. The hunger for that ease grows, and the trust and companionship that underpins it is now both rare and more valuable in the face of the destruction being wrought everywhere.

Not merely on White South Africa but on White worldwide. The author is right when he says, ‘That South Africa has not been left behind. Rather, it is the forerunner – the forerunner in civilisational suicide.’

To the book itself: It purports to be a memoir, and loosely, it hangs on the chronology of his decisions and his career as a journalist and teacher, but it is a paeon of nostalgia for the Eden that was our country, its unparalleled beauty, its heedless liberty, and above all, its potential to remain so and to grow organically. Rich in resources, enough for everybody if well managed, and privileged in its agriculture, its sunlight, and what were once its pristine beaches, now its wondrous, punching surf breaks on raw sewage.

We are taught that any difference in achievement is not a function of either human endeavour or the tragic and comic accidents of reality – but by injustice and oppression.

He talks of the school in which he lived and taught (and I know exactly which it is, for I attended its sister school and the annual Shakespearean productions in its grounds) and its surrender to ‘liberal conformity’ that has eroded its commitment to be equal to any school anywhere, and to its traditional Christian values that were not ardently evangelical, but offered the traditions of choral and liturgical practice, and by those means, other riches, poetry, cathedrals, European cities and on and on… Those of us who grew up there know just how fragile but tenacious those threads to culture elsewhere were. They made literature and philosophies relevant and gave us linkages and legitimacy.

 When a young teacher enlists, it is to the marshalled traditions of education, its spheres of creative thought, and its legacies in the arts and sciences, not to find himself serving in the ranks of goose-stepping propaganda. Yet the oasis of Natal midlands beauty, well-mown cricket fields, a cloistered chapel and handsome gables persuaded him to stay on until staying asked too great a moral compromise with debatable goals, diminishing returns and his family’s safety. Teaching as a profession places one in the cross-hairs of continual self-examination. Going slimly is not possible. Speak out and expose your jugular, or stay quietly complicit and expose your soul? A Hobson’s choice.

I, like many, have received privileges – to grow up in beauty, to know the Faith. Wrestling in angst over that is not a virtue – it is purely a will to false moral superiority, a decadent bid for self-righteous power – a lazy way of avoiding the challenge of putting your privilege to real use.

Very few in the current climate would understand, but I do, and my grandfather (Long ago Director of Education in Uganda, Botswana and Lesotho) would have done, for the same conflicting loyalties destroyed him. His were different Whitehall injunctions: that Africans should be educated for servitude, not for aspiration, but colonial restrictions were just as self-satisfied as liberal wokery is now, and just as limiting to critical thinking and expansive exploration.

No doubt the first furies will proclaim that he has no right to even refer to such privilege, denied to the majority, but I have reason to understand that denial, and who was responsible for it, long before 1948’s apartheid. History has a habit of tripping up dogmas.

A mid-wit is half-educated. Half education is to see through things, without seeing anything, without being conscious of the fact that there is a ‘you’ seeing. It is to ignore the sacrifice and glory of your ancestors who wrote symphonies, made wine, built cathedrals, invented steam engines, put plumbing in houses, and discovered aspirin and anaesthetics.

The comfort the author finds in other philosophies is one I share because when you are as alone as we are, rejected and vilified as we have been, other views and philosophies are crucial in assisting a straightened back and yet another step forward. Alone to decipher both his rage and his love, his references are broad, from Thomas Aquinas to Dostoyevsky, Dickens to the Bible, and with his Christian faith, he wrestles to derive the core values, not the ease of any kind of conformity to appearances. Christ tends to become important to the persecuted, and persecution takes many forms. Wounds do not always bleed; some bruise and paralyse. This author has refused paralysis.

‘Jesus seems subversive in an anti-life system because of his love for Life, for a higher order. Feasts, miracles, wine from water. No, the Pharisees would rather he had parsed over the thousands of little rules that gave them power. Today, these rules are to do with the privileges of birth, the right words to use, inane historical debate, and curriculum policy in schools. Meanwhile, the streets run with plastic and faeces!

He continues, ‘I also came to hate the liberal depiction of Jesus Christ. In the gospels, Jesus spends zero time agitating for de-colonialism against the Roman occupation – despite eventually being killed by crucifixion. He makes the famous division between what is owed to God and what is owed to Caesar. The political is not allowed to subsume the sacred.’

Obvious, perhaps, but in need of re-stating for our age of secular gods and newly lethal politics.

There is so much richness in this book, even for those who may not initially identify with the rage. The challenge of recent events and the self-congratulation that now predominates in those who have refused to examine what they believe or to think afresh are succinctly dealt with

‘The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus, some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.’

My references, sixty years ago, would have been different: the classics of South African literature, Olive Schreiner’s Stories of an African Farm, Herman Bosman’s Mafeking Road, and Jock of the Bushveldt, but that affectionate (and sardonic) South Africa has disappeared. That is the substance of Waldburger’s rage. It was so, so unique and so precious, and when we are not raging, we weep. Waldburger is offering everyone the chance to understand why.

I could go on quoting and recommending, but I hope I have said enough to persuade readers to read the book.

P.S. I see that one review has already been removed by that monopoly that sells books, so I will post a careful review there, and this one on Substack, in the hope that perhaps the author will get to hear how much his book meant to a fellow lover.  I am on the point of publishing my own, ‘Safari of a Patchwork Pilgrim,’ which recaptures the Eden he laments is lost (and many other things besides). I am considerably older than he is and was lucky to catch it by its disappearing tail. I wanted it to be remembered. Waldburger has asked for it to be mourned. We are both sprung from the same cock-crowing, rusty windmill veldt; across it, the wind still whistles.

(All quotes are taken from his book)