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Fatal Visions
| Article
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10900 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1993 |
1,838 Words |
| Author
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Michael Thorpe
Michael Thorpe, a poet and critic of international English
literature, grew up during World War II in Norfolk, England,
from whose airfields the bombing campaign was launched. His
latest poetry collection is The Unpleasant Subject: Sketches
Around Hitler (TSAR 2001). |
THIS DAY AND AGE
Mile Nicol
New York: Knopf, 1992
276pp., $22.00
In 1921, at a village in the eastern cape called Bulhoek, there was a massacre three times as great as the slaughter at Sharpeville forty years later. It caused little stir outside South Africa, whose minister for native affairs was then the African hero General Smuts. The 163 killed and 129 wounded were members of an independent black church called the Israelites. They had gathered on commonage at Bulhoek under their messianic leader, Enoch Mgijima, in expectation of the Lord's coming and the world's end. Meanwhile, hard-pressed for sustenance, they had begun petty pilfering, which annoyed both white and black residents of the area. Efforts for law enforcement and failed, Jehovah being their sole authority. In any case, the laws were white, notably the 1913 Native's Land act, which severely restricted native settlement and dislodged them from vast tracts of ancestral land. When finally the police were sent to disperse them, many of Mgijima's one thousand followers, believing more strongly that 'the time of Jehovah has arrived" than in the force of arms, charged against machine guns. At the survivors' trial the judge observed that they used their religion as a cloak, being really was coming when the black man would have his freedom."
The judge's words are quoted in the booklet Because They Chose the Plan of God (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1988) by Robert Edgar, one of the historians acknowledged by Mike Nicol in This Day and Age, which elaborates a bold fiction out of the ill-fated Israelites' relatively obscure history. It opens with three epigraphs, one from Mgijima himself: "When people rally round the world of God, people must die." Flanking that quotation is one from Hannath Arendt, on the inescapable modern post-Enlightenment fate of "historical necessity," an done from D.F. Malan, prinicipal architect of Afrikaner nationalism: "Afrikanerdom is not the work of men but the creation of God." Thus, two divinely sanctioned movements clash, the victory going to the one with greater firepower. Or so, in the real world, it happens: It Nicol's denouement Enoch ascends, or his torn body is spirited away.
It was. It was not.
This Day and Age is not, despite the background sketched here, a historical novel, as generally understood. Of the story we may say, as Salman Rushdie is fond of doing in the manner of the traditional Arab
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