Author: Matthew Blackman

Since Ta-Nehisi Coates’s powerful argument for reparations for slavery, in his 2014 essay in the Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” the idea has not slipped from political view. And the case for reparations is seemingly gathering political momentum. Philosophers, economists, and historians have all added their weight to the argument. But there are others, like the black Marxist Prof. Adolph Reed, who argue against them.

In 2014, the public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates made the point that colonialism and slavery were not simply about oppression, they were about theft. South African lawyer and historian Tembeka Ngcukaitobi agrees with this, saying ‘the continued poverty of Africans is directly and indirectly attributable to the policies of the British empire: slavery, taking of the land, cattle theft, mineral extraction, forced labour.’ As Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, a philosophy professor at Georgetown University, argues, colonial conquests and practices ‘literally built the world and the planet-sized social, economic and political system that we have.’

Coates argues that a commission should be set up to uncover the crimes and identify who did what. As he says, ‘I think it’s crucial to tie reparations to specific acts.’  The French economist Thomas Piketty says government officials generally argue that ‘this history is too distant to be indemnified.’ Neither he nor Coates nor Ngcukaitobi find this a convincing argument. Ngcukaitobi says, ‘payment by a specific person to a specific individual’ should be what happens. In South Africa, for example, the issue is not historically complicated. Companies and mines have, within living memory, exploited and dispossessed people of colour in South Africa. Companies such as Nasionale Pers (Naspers) and De Beers Mining Company have well-known links to colonial oppression and apartheid.

Naspers, one of the wealthiest companies in South Africa, famously refused even to offer a submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. For over twenty years, Naspers declined to apologise for their very active role in producing apartheid’s propaganda. In 2015 an apology was made at the firm’s hundred-year celebrations, and black singers were invited to perform an anti-apartheid song.

But as the prominent black Marxist, and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, Adolph Reed protests, the politics of reparations creates exactly these kinds of, largely meaningless, public apologies … What he calls ‘maudlin psychobabble.’ Apologies, he claims, distract people from the urgent necessity to act against poverty and to uplift those excluded from decent healthcare and education. Germany, Britain and Belgium have all apologised for their colonial practices. But as the ex-minister of Human Rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo says, during colonialism ‘we were destroyed. Apologies are easy, but when you do something, you have to take responsibility for it.’

So should countries pay? Ngcukaitobi says: ‘yes, they should.’ Colonialism he goes on, ‘created a life of affluence for British citizens and massive wealth for British corporations at the expense of Africans.’ He also adds that the Dutch, who were the first colonial power in South Africa, should also pay up for their genocidal practices against the Khoikhoi inhabitants of the Cape. As the black poet Robert Grendon wrote of the Dutch in 1902, only a few years before his own people, the Herero, faced acts of genocide at the hands of the Germans:

Thy race, great pioneer has hunted men—

The Bushman small—with horses and with dogs; 

Destroyed the bonds of love ‘twixt man and wife; 

And those ‘twixt parents and their little ones;

Have flayed alive without compassion both the frames

And limbs of those weak slaves; and then—alas—

Surpassing tigers in their cruelty

As Ngcukaitobi argues: ‘holding the Dutch society responsible today for what their ancestors did 300 years ago is not a churlish thing, but an act of justice.’ Interestingly, many Dutch people, until recently, seemed to agree with the idea of paying reparations. A 2021 study showed that the Dutch people ‘were more supportive of instrumental reparations than of political apology.’

Coates has pointed out that paying reparations for doing wrong is nothing new. Following the Holocaust, West Germany paid Israel 3 million marks. As Piketty points out, the heirs of the Hohenzollern (the Prussian royal family, which fell from power in 1918) ‘are currently suing the German state for residences and works of art for which they claim they were insufficiently indemnified.’ And then there is the case of the United States Civil Liberties Act of 1988 where $20,000 was paid out to each of the Japanese Americans interned during World War II. As Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò points out, there are also well-established legal frameworks in personal injury litigation. However, Táíwò worries that these kinds of debates have the potential to ‘view Black suffering in accounting terms’ and will not redress issues to do with suffering and trauma.

Certainly, the idea of paying compensation in the context of slavery is far from unprecedented. The British, after abolishing slavery in their empire in 1834, paid an incredible £20 million worth of compensation. However, this money was paid to the slave owners rather than the slaves. Most of the money, in fact, never left Britain. Much of it was paid to the stay-at-home Caribbean plantation owners, who had been active participants in some of the most heinous crimes against humanity the world has ever witnessed. According to Piketty, the £20 million was about 5 percent of the United Kingdom’s national income at the time. As he says, ‘if a government decided to devote to such a policy the same proportion of the British national income, it would have to pay approximately 120 billion euros.’ The question remains: if the British could do it then for the slaveowners, why not now for the victims’ descendants?

Prof. Reed, however, has famously argued against the politics of reparations. He does not deny ‘that blacks have been systematically disadvantaged as a result of slavery and its aftermath.’ But Reed believes that reparations for racial groups go some way to suggesting that ‘the inequality produced by capitalism is legitimate.’ That is, it suggests that poverty and inequality has simply been created by racism and not the capitalist system. Reed fears that ‘racial interest-group politics’ is displacing social-democratic beliefs for a fair and equitable distribution of resources. What is needed, Reed argues, is to build ‘broad solidarity across race, gender, and other identities.’  Clearly defined racial reparations, Reed says, ‘cut precisely against building such solidarity.’

William Plomer’s scandalous novel Turbott Wolfe, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1926, was written when Plomer was only 21 and living in a Zulu reserve in South Africa. It was according to Nadine Gordimer ‘the only novel of poetic vision to come out of our country since Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm.’ The book caused something of an outcry in South Africa with its provocative themes of miscegenation and interracial love. Predictably, it was widely condemned by the local press. But as Stephen Gray pointed out, there was no need for the apartheid government to censor it: Turbott Wolfe was simply left to go out of print.

Gray, it should be noted, did his best to keep the novel alive, republishing it in 1980. But to no avail. South Africa, with its tragically low number of active readers and its Scotch mist of cultural amnesia, let it fall from its hand into the neglected peri-urban landfill of forgetting. And as Prof. Gareth Cornwell wrote in an extended academic essay:

The “moment” of or for Turbott Wolfe has passed, and I cannot for the life of me imagine a future context for its rehabilitation. The novel is out of print and no longer taught at South African universities …Turbott Wolfe will vanish into the sinkhole of history – along with the rest, from the lilting cadences of Cry, the Beloved Country to the “essential gestures” of Nadine Gordimer.

This is sad stuff from a professor who has dedicated a considerable amount of time to Plomer’s ‘extraordinary’ first novel. But the claim that, as a white-male-colonial writer, Plomer does not fit into our current value systems, might not be far off the mark.

Plomer was born in South Africa in 1903. He was educated at both a public school in Britain and at St. John’s in Johannesburg. After leaving school he became a farmer, working in the Eastern Cape, but ended up running a trading post with his father in Enthumeni within a Zulu reserve in northern Natal.

But he was always set on becoming a writer. While working in Natal he became interested in the Zulu newspaper Ilanga Lase Natal, edited by the first president of the African National Congress, John Dube. Plomer began corresponding with Dube, who went on to publish Plomer’s first poems in 1924. As Plomer’s biographer, Peter F. Alexander, puts it, his first poem published in Ilanga ‘concerned the need for blacks and whites in South Africa to move towards one another.’ As the correspondence continued between the Plomer and Dube, he went down to meet Dube and stayed with him, finding, as he would recount, a fascinating thinker and conversationalist.

In the year after these poems were published, while on business trips down in Durban, Plomer also befriended the impulsive and provocative poet Roy Campbell. It was an unlikely friendship for the urbane Plomer to have made, but the writers shared three interests: a love of literature, a loathing for racism, and a desire to stir the South African pot. By the time they met, Campbell was 24 (two years older than Plomer), but he was already famous due to the glowing reception his poem The Flaming Terrapin received in both America and Europe.

In 1925 a wealthy sugar farmer by the name of Lewis Reynolds, who admired Campbell’s poetry, offered to put up the money to begin a literary magazine. Campbell then offered Plomer the position of sub-editor with an equal share of the £20 salary. The magazine Voorslag was born. However, Voorslag would soon run into issues. Its radical anti-racist editorial position, as well as its self-proclaimed ‘mocking’ and ‘blasphemous’ tone, rankled with Reynolds. Reynolds, who had political aspirations and who had been the private secretary of Jan Smuts during the Versailles conference, soon decided to cut its funding.

In the same year that Voorslag ended, Turbott Wolfe was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf as part of their famous Hogarth Press imprint. Plomer had sent the manuscript to the Woolfs in 1924 with a jocular accounting double-entry-style note attached to it with ‘Assets’ and ‘Drawbacks’.  Amongst those assets, Plomer claimed that the book had ‘a tendency towards satire’ and that ‘I am young’. In ‘drawbacks’ he stated ‘I have no typewriter. For this I lay before you my humblest apologies and my pencilled MS’. What he also considered a drawback was that ‘I am young’. Leonard Woolf replied by stating that he found the book ‘very interesting’ and then, in further correspondence, he stated that he and Virginia wished to publish it.

On publication, the book received very positive reviews in both the UK and the USA. It was variously stated in the US to be ‘volcanic’, ‘the best novel of the year’ and ‘a work of genius’. However, in South Africa a more hostile reception awaited. Harold Wodson’s review in the Natal Advisor stated, under the headline ‘A Nasty Book on a Nasty Subject’, that ‘what provokes a sense of nausea in the present volume is the unrelieved wretchedness of the entire picture.’

With Turbott Wolfe and Voorslag loathed locally, Plomer soon realised there were few prospects for developing a writing career in the infertile literary lands of his birth. He also had begun to realise he was homosexual and that there was little prospect of living peacefully in an intolerant South African society. Plomer left South Africa in 1926, returning only once very briefly in 1956 as a mature man of letters. As he stated in his autobiography: ‘I could not imagine living there in a state of tension that I should only find endurable if bent on martyrdom or at least victimisation.’

With no wish to be victimised or martyred, Plomer was also never comfortable with the idea that he was truly South African. As he remarked once: ‘simply because a cat has her kittens in an oven does not make them biscuits.’ Like many twentieth-century thinkers, Plomer was not convinced about reified notions of identity. He was always happiest existing in the grey, shadowy, and inconclusive margins. Even if these were the rather large margins occupied by those dropouts, cranks, liberals, homosexuals, communists, and Catholic reactionaries who made up the British art and literary establishment in the mid-twentieth century. But Plomer did, in some manners, become as English as Heinz baked beans.

One thing that can be said to be South African, however, is the setting and themes of Turbott Wolfe.  The work addresses the idea of miscegenation and the dilemma of a white man falling in love with a black woman (or as Plomer’s biographer suggested, a black male, fictionally dressed as a woman). The book is wholly and unblinkingly interested in its social present – South Africa of the 1920s – without sentimentality or phoney political posturing.

Perhaps most confusing, in a South African context, is that Turbott Wolfe lacks ideological commitment and a clear message. Plomer was no ‘fellow traveller’. If his life and writing was marked by anything, it was an ironic distance from ideology. This was mingled with a dose of personal self-doubt and a little sexual and relational confusion.

These elements of Plomer’s life, his understanding of the confusing political and personal soup we all find ourselves in, are marked out in Turbot Wolfe. To be sure, irony, satire and political and personal inconsistency, which Turbot Wolfe exudes with every phrase, have never been popular in a South African literary or political context. All writers and artists should be, as the French put it, engagé. Their work must be signposted, their worldview pronounced. Many South African critics have gaped at Turbott Wolfe, at this half-fish-half-canine-like novel, demanding that only the fish or only the wolf be ideologically revealed. Theorists can only provide the fishing tackle or the choke-chain to cope with the book’s ironic distance. Turbott Wolfe has often been reduced by critics to a singular ideological pronouncement that reflects Plomer’s supposed ‘world view’.

In a country that has put great literary weight on two forms of artistic discourse, that of political commitment and that of materialism, Turbott Wolfe is hermeneutically confusing. Many critics have tried to force it and its author to speak from an ideological position. But to ask this of the novel is simply to request the wolf to live in water. Plomer, unlike so many South Africans, had no interest in ideology or for that matter materialism. His houses and flats in the UK were said to be Spartanly furnished, even the books he read were sold or given away after reading. His first act in any house he moved into was said to be the ripping out the telephone line and placing that noisome ringing box in the rubbish bin.

But this is not to say that Plomer’s brilliant first novel is not about politics or materialism – it would hardly be a South African novel if it wasn’t. The book certainly is about South Africa’s racist, almost Orwellian, bureaucracy and the type of society that supports it.

The story of Turbott Wolfe begins with the visit of a character called ‘William Plomer’ to his friend Turbott Wolfe, who is dying of an unnamed African disease in a tawdry English seaside town. The novel starts with the comic scene of the fatally diseased Wolfe telling Plomer of the art of salesmanship. ‘[I]f you want to be a success in trade, in art, in politics, in life itself,’ Wolfe says, ‘you must never give people what they want. Give them what you want them to want. Then you are safe.’ Here, as in much of the novel, Plomer’s words are sodden with irony.

Of course, many critics have leapt to the dull and repetitious conclusion that Wolfe’s disease shows a clear authorial prejudice against Africa. That is, critics claim, Wolfe has in some way been infected by Africa itself. And perhaps, to be fair, this is the case. But if there is a disease in Africa, in the novel it is wholly held in the white colonial community. It is the whites of the novel who are described as ugly, morally corrupt, and contaminated. And if Africa is looked on poorly at times, it is England that is described as ‘dingy’ and ‘dismal’, and Wolfe’s living arrangements in England as ‘grotesque’.

To be sure there is ‘othering’ in the novel. Black people, on the whole, are quite clearly described in another register to whites. Their culture, appearances, decency, nobility, and strangeness are regularly noted and alluded to. But they also appear as fully developed characters, intelligent, and cultured. What is more, Wolfe falls – although only Platonically – in love with Nhliziyombi and he joins a society called Young Africa, which promotes miscegenation. Of course, by the end of the book, he is clearly not convinced by the idea of ‘Euroafrica’ which the society promotes, nor by the marriage of a white woman to a black man.

Certainly the novel’s ‘message’ never suggests that all will soon be well in Africa. Nor that Wolfe and his fellow members of Young Africa can create a new world and form a new perfectly functioning society. Wolfe’s experiences, like those of Marlow in Heart of Darkness (a book that clearly heavily influenced Plomer), are ‘inconclusive’.

In mentioning the often-noted influence of Joseph Conrad on Turbott Wolfe, it should be said that the book is far from being Conradian in its pitch, tone or style. Plomer was of a generation and of a class whose contribution to literature, certainly within a British context, was one of satire and irony, and one that never offered hope. George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell (not to mention Plomer) were all part of the same group of public-school boys who produced sardonic reproductions of the social environments they grew up in. Of those three, Plomer’s early life was closest to Orwell’s. But his wit and humour was nearer to that of Waugh’s cuttingly brilliant early comic satires. One can hardly read certain passages in Turbott Wolfe without thinking of Waugh. And, like Waugh, Plomer saves his most biting passages for his peers – in Plomer’s case, his fellow white colonials.

A Mr Bloodfield (a very Waugh-like piece of nomenclature) is described arriving at Wolfe’s trading post in Lembuland like this:

A stinking motor-car drew up at the very door. I had to go out into the dazzling sunlight. There was an ugly fellow with a female. Neither of them seemed to have any manners or any brains. I had to ask his name. It was Bloodfield. I managed to get from him the information that he was a farmer at Ovuyzanyana.

Wolfe’s ironic, comic disdain and distance continue through much of the book. His description of the missionaries and their history in Africa and with Africans is representative of his tone and general attitude:

The missionaries brought them the sacrament, but I could give you more than one instance where they brought them syphilis too.

Critics have used Wolfe’s personal doubts about life in Africa and its future as a method of interpreting the political and ideological position of the novel and its author. But this would certainly be a critical error. Firstly, it ignores the tone of Wolfe’s voice, which is too conceited to be trusted in its pronouncements. Secondly, it falls into the lazy critical position of conflating the author with the character. As Albert Camus once put it:

you can also write about incest without having necessarily hurled yourself on your unfortunate sister; and I have nowhere read that Sophocles ever thought of killing his father and dishonouring his mother.

Wolfe is precisely not William Plomer, the story itself denies this. Wolfe, after all, narrates his tale of Africa to a fictional character called ‘William Plomer’. And as such Wolfe’s voice is not the final authorial word. Plomer’s opinions in the novel itself, remain entirely unstated and unknowable. The novel is not, as David Brown once suggested, ‘bound by the parameters of his [Plomer’s] world view’, although they are to a certain extent bound by Wolfe’s – there is a difference.

It is here where Plomer is closest to another of his English contemporaries, the novelist Anthony Powell and his A Dance to the Music of Time. The thoughts and opinions of the narrator are kept at a distance. Just what Plomer’s opinions are, is not the point. Plomer, like Nick Jenkins of A Dance, is simply a sounding board. He is the listener, not a speaker. He is simply the messenger of a contrarian English voice in Africa, that of Turbott Wolfe’s.

 

On 4 July 1849, braving Cape Town’s infamous winter rain and wind, a large multi-racial crowd began to gather outside the Commercial Exchange on Heerengracht Street (now Adderley Street). The date had been chosen for very specific reasons, being the anniversary of the declaration of American independence. For once Capetonians of all varieties had come out, as AF Hattersley put it, ‘Coloured folk and Malays…[and] many of the comfort-loving occupants of suburban homes’ mingled together. For seven hours the crowd of 7000 stood warming their hands in their pockets and stamping their feet against the cold but all the while listening attentively to 23 speakers.

This rare showing of community solidarity had been provoked when news reached Cape Town that a ship named the Neptune had picked up 286 mainly Irish prisoners in Bermuda and was heading for Simon’s Town. Exactly ten months previous, on 4 September 1848, Queen Victoria ‘was advised to direct, by Her Order in Council,’ that the Cape Colony should be a place for the transportation of convicts. This policy was heartily agreed to by the governor of the Cape, Sir Harry Smith, who believed convict labour would be a significant boon to the colony.

Cape Town itself was up to this point a peaceful town with little crime and very little violence. The idea that it would be turned into a penal colony was abhorrent to citizens from the Cape to the Kat River Settlement. It also suggested something else to the people of the Cape who had begun to yearn for their own representative government. Till this point, the Cape had only a legislative Council comprising colonial officials and a few hand-selected locals chosen because of their closeness to the governor.s

 

The people of Cape Town soon realised that if the Cape were to become a penal colony, wrote Hattersley, ‘an autocratic government’ was ‘a necessary condition.’ The minute one of the 286 prisoners took their first small step on the Cape’s dry land, it would be a giant step backwards for any hope of a representative democracy at the Cape.

The most prominent man to stride onto the platform on that rainy day on 4 July was John Fairbairn. A Lowland Scot whose fighting spirit had some twenty years earlier brought a free press to the Cape, Fairbairn had scant regard for the distinctions of class, rank and race. He had begun to strongly identify with his adopted country and longed for a democratic representative government. He called out to the crowd that what the Cape required were ‘free institutions, self-government, perfect liberty and the open field for virtue, industry and talent’.

Fairbairn was by then already seen as the leader of what became known as the Anti-Convict Association. At this and other meetings, Fairbairn called on the people of the Cape to take a pledge:

We hereby solemnly declare and pledge our faith to each other that we will not employ or knowingly admit into our establishments or houses, work with or for, or associate with any convict felon sent into this Colony under sentence of transportation and that we will discountenance and drop connection with any person who may assist in landing, supporting or employing such convicted felons.

Thousands in the Cape agreed to the pledge which effectively placed a sanction on the Cape government and the British administration. Very few – in fact, hardly any – merchants, tradesmen or farmers broke the pledge, as it meant they would be ‘held in public odium’. Governor Harry Smith was himself threatened by the Anti-Convict Association with ‘starvation’ – it claimed it would attempt to stop people selling him food.

In the days that followed these meetings, crowds began to gather on the streets of Cape Town, hooting and hissing at government officials as they went about their business. And, as fate would have it, during this period the death of one member of the Legislative Council and the resignations ‘due to ill health’ of two more left the body without its decision-making quorum. Three new members were needed for it to function legally. Fairbairn, who had now become the moving spirit of the anti-convict movement, would proclaim: ‘Will any colonist venture to accept the vacant seat? To offer it at this moment to any gentleman would be an insult. To accept it would be eternal degradation.’

The Council scheduled its next meeting for 10 July 1849. After learning of the meeting, the people of Cape Town downed tools and gathered around the Council’s building, some forcing their way in. To their shock, they discovered that three new members had been sworn in. When the large angry crowd outside caught wind of this, they began calling for the three new members’ heads. Let us ‘testify our “respect” for the new members,’ somebody was heard to cry and the crowd began to press towards the doors.

When Smith left the building supported by his aide-de-camp, he was met with stony silence. The same could not be said for two of the new members who followed Smith out of the door, Mr Cloete (a wealthy Stellenbosch farmer) and Mr de Smidt (owner of Groote Schuur). ‘Down with them – shame on them – traitors – let them have it,’ the crowd began to yell, and with this verbal downpour came a shower of rotten eggs and rubbish from the street.

Cloete managed to escape to his brother’s offices nearby, but De Smidt was left to his own devices, which were few and insufficient for defending himself against the angry crowd. In short, he received a swift beating before taking shelter in the offices of the Road Board, where he managed to lock the door behind him.

Mr Jacob Letterstedt, the third new member and owner of the Newlands Brewery, had seemingly been more sensible than Cloete and De Smidt. On seeing the unruly crowd gathered at the doors of the legislature, he waited before leaving. Mistakenly believing the crowd had settled down, he finally strode out. As historian Sir George Cory puts it, he left ‘under the protection of the great man’s wig’, but ‘in this however Mr Letterstedt miscalculated’. Like the others, he was assailed with sticks and stones and harmful words. He managed to find refuge in the South African Club House on Plein Street, however, and there he waited until mounted police came to scatter those still intent on furthering their ‘discussions’ with him.

During the night a large crowd of protestors gathered on the Grand Parade, where they burnt effigies of the three new councillors. They were said to have danced around the fires ‘with savage glee’ while others ‘amused themselves by destroying property belonging to the members of Cape Town’. The crowd was finally broken up by another charge by mounted police.

But they had not finished with Letterstedt. Crowds gathered at his various properties across the city and destroyed one of his general stores as well as his large brewery in Newlands. In the coming weeks, when he tried to have these repaired, he learnt that his ‘great man’s wig’ was no influence against the Anti-Convict Association’s pledge: no tradesman, carpenter or glazer would fix any of the damage done to his property.

Seven days later, with all of this going on and the Colony baying for their blood, ‘Messrs Cloete, Letterstedt and de Smidt found it expedient to resign their seats in the Legislative Council.’ And when the Neptune came to anchor in Simon’s Bay on 19 September, a vigilance committee was set up to closely monitor the ship. This was how it was discovered that Captain Robert Stanford and Mr Letterstedt (rather predictably) had broken the boycott and profited off the Neptune’s presence in the bay by selling produce to the ship’s captain. The vigilance committee did, however, make sure that no convict reached Cape soil.

While the Neptune was docked in a form of purgatory in Simon’s Town, violence began to spread through Cape Town, and Governor Smith declared martial law. As more protests were called, Fairbairn was attacked and beaten in his home in Green Point by a group of ‘coloured inhabitants, but also a few Whites in disguise’. These men were seemingly in somebody’s pay, and rumours abounded of a plot to murder Fairbairn.

Harry Smith was, like the Neptune, now tethered to unwelcoming shores and unable to perform his duties. Eventually, going against the British demands, he refused the Neptune permission to release its cargo into the Colony. Due to pressure from the likes of Fairbairn, Smith had stated that he was ‘profoundly opposed to the Cape of Good Hope being made into a Penal Colony for ordinary felons’. Finally, with the Anti-Convict Association refusing to give up their protest, Earl Grey gave instructions for the Neptune to weigh anchor and head for Van Diemen’s Land (modern-day Tasmania).

The anti-convict campaign had showed what collective and steadfast protest could achieve. As McCracken puts it, Fairbairn’s crusade ‘had stirred political consciousness as never before and evoked an unprecedented unity.’

(The events of 1849 would lead to the Cape achieving representative government, with men of all races voting for their leaders in the 1854 elections. This remarkable tale is covered in detail in our book Spoilt Ballots.)

In the summer of 1556 Martin Guerre, after an eight-year absence, returned home to the small village of Artigat in the foothills of the Pyrenees. He had come back transformed from the young man he had once been. Shrunken and less keen on displays of acrobatics, the people of Atrigat seemingly noticed these changes with little concern. Martin had left the village in disgrace, having stolen some corn from his father, and his return had all the narrative redolence of the prodigal son.

Martin Guerre had married the beautiful Bertande de Rols at a very tender age. Bertrande would testify in court that she had been a girl of around ten at the time (although for various reasons historians believe that she was older and had at least ‘started her flowers’ as the medieval French referred to a woman’s first menstruation). We know of Bertande’s beauty because the first mention Judge Jean de Coras makes of Bernarde, in his manuscript Arrest Memorable, is that she was a peasant woman of great beauty.

But despite the belle Bertrande and despite Martin Guerre’s youthful interests in manly acrobatics and fencing, their marriage bed was one of frigidity and impotence. As the historian Nathalie Zemon Davis tells us, the couple had been ‘cast under a spell’. Bertrande bore no children for many years and there was pressure in the village to have the marriage annulled. Martin was almost certainly subjected to a charivari, a mock parade where “rough music” was played and to express displeasure with the cursed marriage.

As Bertrande would testify, both her and Martin had been bewitched by ‘the charms of a sorceress’ which meant they could not perform the ‘marriage act’.  Then, Bertrande stated, after eight years of marital frustration an old woman ‘appeared suddenly as if from heaven’ and lifted the spell. Bertrande conceived almost immediately and bore a son some nine months later.

But this did not seem to allay Martin’s humiliation. What perhaps made matters worse was that Martin’s family were French Basques who had moved to French-speaking Artigat. Martin had, perhaps, some issues with integrating with the other children of the village. Even his name, Martin, was out of place, being the colloquial term for an animal or a wild bear. And 1548 he left the village of his birth and his wife, and crossed the Pyrenees into the Spanish Basque country. After some time in Spain, he ended up joining the Spanish army. And while fighting against his fellow Frenchmen at the Battle of St Quintin in 1557 was shot and had his leg amputated. As Davis puts it, ‘the days of Martin Guerre’s agility were over.’

When he returned to the Languedoc region near Artigat he did not go immediately to his wife, the beautiful and stubbornly loyal Bertrande. Instead, he took up at an inn in a village nearby. There he told the innkeeper that he was Martin Guerre and was said to have wept at the mention of his wife and family. Word spread that Martin Guerre had returned from eight years of soldiering and his four sisters rushed to the inn. On seeing him they ‘greeted him with delight’ and went back to fetch Bertrande. Bertrande, it seems, was initially confused by certain changes in her husband’s appearance. As the law clerk Guillaum Le Sueur, noted in his account of the matter Histoire Admirable: ‘The first time she gazed upon him, she resisted for a long time anxiously; and expressing doubt, she seemed to wish to turn away from him.’

But Martin spoke to Bertrande softly, recounting their disastrous marriage night and reminding her of the white hose she’d made him, that he had left behind in a wooden chest. She is then said to have clasped him around the neck and kissed him saying that perhaps it was the beard that made it difficult to recognise him. His uncle, Pierre Guerre, who after Martin’s father’s death was now the patriarch of the family, was also unconvinced by Martin’s changed appearance. But after having talked together he was soon won over.

Martin, however, still did not go to Artigat. As he would confess to his wife, he had contracted the pox and did not wish to infect her. And in return his wife took to caring for him at the inn until he recovered. Just quite what happened during the time they spent there together is unclear. However, by the time Martin returned to Artigat  Jean de Coras notes that:

He greeted by name almost everyone he met who knew Martin Guerre, without having otherwise seen them or known them; and if they found it difficult to recognize him, he brought to mind all kinds of things from the past, and said to each one in particular, “Don’t you remember when we were at such and such a place, ten, twelve, fifteen or twenty years ago, and we did such and such a thing in the presence of so and so and where we talked about such and such?

What seemed certain was that the heir to the fortunes of the Guerre family in Artigat was back. And the loyal Bertrande’s hopes and dreams had seemingly come true. They lived together, as Bertrande would testify, in a newfound marital bliss ‘eating, drinking and sleeping together.’ And with their love arrived two young daughters, one of whom died in early childhood. As Le Sueur would describe it, Martin lived with Bertrande ‘quietly, without strife, and conducted himself so well in every way with her that no one could suspect any deceit.’ But as those who noted the absence of the mention of Martin’s missing leg may have realised, the man who had been accepted as Martin Guerre by his wife, family and the village of his birth, was not Martin Guerre – his name was in fact Arnaud du Tihl.

Arnaud was, as his surname reveals, from Tihl, some 240km northwest of Artigat. While travelling locally, he had once been mistaken for the troubled Martin – an event which clearly lit a candle in his mind. Far from troubled, Arnuad was known in his own town as a troubling dissolute youth ‘absorbed in every vice’. He had a fondness for heavy drinking and eating and as a result gained the nickname ‘Pansette’ or ‘the belly’. He was also well known for having a proclivity for sexual misdeeds, which accounts for the fact that he had syphilis when he was first with Bertande.

But he was also a quick-witted man, with a gift of the gab and the memory of an iron chest. In fact so clever was he, Davis says, that many people who knew him suspected him of magic.

Just quite how he transformed himself into Martin Guerre is a matter of speculation. Davis, the academic who has done the most research into the mystery, is convinced that Arnuad’s transformation into Martin could not have been done without the collusion of Bertrande. The critic of Davis, Robert Finlay, sides instead with Judge De Coras’s view that Pansette was a masterful arch-trickster capable of fooling completely the innocent and unsuspecting Bertrande. As Finlay puts it, in De Coras’s judgment Bertrande was found to have been duped as a result of ‘the weakness of her sex, [she was] easily deceived by the cunning and craftiness of men.’ But just how a man, even one greatly gifted in cunning, bamboozling and memory, could have absorbed the huge wealth of memories and histories of a community without some coaching does seem hard to fathom.

One thing both Davis and Finlay agree on is that Aurnuad was transformed not only into an acceptable version of Martin for the Guerre family, but also that he had transformed from a youth of vice and infidelity into a man who, even with literally a noose around his neck, refused to betray Bertrande. With Bertrande in his life, Aurnuad ‘the Belly’ du Tihl seems to have transformed ‘beyond the mask of the carnival player and the stratagems of the mere inheritance seeker’ into a trustworthy man whose love for his common-law wife was unbreakable.

The trouble began, as trouble always begins, with the mixing of money and family. Despite Pansette’s almost seamless inclusion into the Guerre family, strife unravelled the stitching when the new Martin asked his uncle Pierre for the accounts of his inheritance from his father. As Davis recounts from the historical records ‘“he asked him in fair words” which the gifted Pansette always had on the tip of his tongue’. But Pansette’s magic in this instance failed him. And it was this continued argument that would lead Pierre Guerre to question the many inconsistencies of Martin’s identity. Of course having no photographs, no portraits and being completely cut off from any written and legal world, peasants would have to rely on pure memory for any signs of divergence in identity­ – and the ravages of eight years of hard living can change any man.

But Pierre had a convincing list of differences. Why could Martin not speak his native Basque tongue with fluency anymore?  Why had he lost interest in acrobatics? Why had his body become so short and stocky in adulthood? Why was his complexion lighter? And perhaps most convincing of all, just how did it come to pass that the cobbler had discovered the Martin’s feet had grown smaller with age? As all cobblers could tell you, a man’s feet might grow longer and fatter with age. But smaller? Never! Then, purely by chance, confirmation fell into Pierre’s lap. A wandering soldier one day came to the village and stated that he knew that the real Martin Guerre had lost a leg in battle.

Pierre then worked on Bertrande to bring a case against her husband. And when she refused he began a campaign in the village and the surrounding countryside against him and went as far as to try and pay somebody to kill his supposed nephew. Slowly the patriarch Pierre’s campaign began to rub off and many in the village turned against Pansette. But Martin’s sisters and his wife were unwavering in their support of him. And when Pierre and his sons-in-law ambushed him and set about him with clubs it was Bertrande who got between them putting her body on the line in order to save the person she had accepted as her husband.

But the protestations by the women in Pansette’s life were to no avail. Finally, Pierre’s will prevailed. As De Coras would explain, the issue had split the village down the middle, with similar numbers for and against Pierre’s claims. Slowly the uncle got to Bertrande. She was seemingly forced by the more powerful people in the village to join in by charging the man she had taken as her husband with being an imposter. And Martin was duly arrested.

But despite the seeming betrayal by Bertrande, she stuck to a set of answers throughout her examination which remained in perfect accord with the memories and testimonies of her lover, Pansette. This almost watertight fidelity to a set of memories of their youthful marriage made Davis believe that it could only have been an act of secret collusion between the two. If Bertrande did really wish to have Pansette found guilty, she could have at any moment changed the script to render his testimony suspect. Pansette, meanwhile, covered Bertrande’s tracks by raging in court that the reason his wife had joined in the charge against him was that she was being coerced by his uncle Pierre. In court, Pansette had sworn that he would ‘submit to a thousand cruel deaths if she [Bertrande] would swear he were not her husband’. To this, the faithful Bertrande refused to condemn her lover … Despite the fact that she was listed as bringing the charges against him. It was a dangerous and complicated double game they were playing if Davis is right in her assumptions.

When the judges came to interview the prisoner, De Coras states:

His remarks sustained at length and containing so many true signs, gave great occasion to the judges to be persuaded of the innocence [of the defendant], and beyond that to admire the felicity of his memory, for he recounted innumerable events that happened more than 20 years before. The commissioners by every means possible tried to surprise him in some lie, but could get no advantage on him.

Slowly, the judges in Toulouse were persuaded. The man with the magical memory and his love for his wife must be Martin Guerre. But this was not how the trial was to end. While the judges were deliberating ‘to the advantage of the prisoner’ a man came in from the streets of Toulouse. His one large foot fell silently on the tiled floor of the court, while his other wooden peg leg sounded off a distinctive, solid click. Just why and how Martin Guerre returned at this, the very last moment of the trial, has never been uncovered. But as a result, Arnaud du Tihl confessed and was found guilty of ‘imposture’ and ‘adulatory’. He was sentenced to death and hanged by the neck from a gibbet erected outside the house in Artigat where he and Bertrande had lived. On the ladder, with the rope around his neck, he is said to have called out to the real Martin Guerre not to treat Bertrande harshly. She was, he shouted, a woman of honour, virtue and constancy.

Pansette died at the site of his adulterous affair, asking for God’s mercy in the name of his son Jesus Christ.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Albert Camus has often been dismissed as a supporter of colonial practice – or worse. As his detractors regularly point out, he did write a book about a character called Meursault – a colonial who murdered an Arab on a beach near the city of Algiers. Shortly after Albert Camus’ death, a fellow French-Algerian novelist, Henri Kréa, wrote that Meursault’s infamous murder was the ‘realisation of the obscure and puerile dream of the “poor white” Camus never ceased to be’.

Camus’ legacy has been tainted by these sorts of ad hominem attacks. And they gained ever more traction in the English literary and political world with the help of no less a figure than Edward Said. Said claimed that Camus’ silenced and murdered Arab characters were a clear and obvious indication that the author himself supported the French colonial system.

However, long before Said wrote Culture and Imperialism, Camus observed:

But, after all, you can also write about incest without having necessarily hurled yourself on your unfortunate sister; and I have nowhere read that Sophocles ever thought of killing his father and dishonouring his mother.

Of course, many of those ‘poor whites’ of Algeria, that Kréa refers to, at the time of Camus’ death in 1960, were engaged in a murderous colonial war. A war whose brutality has remained a permanent stain on French history. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people were killed and brutalised by French government forces.

But what was really held against Camus in his lifetime (and after his death), was not that he supported the war (he didn’t), but that he never advocated for Algerian independence. Again, the claim was a simple one: he didn’t want Algeria to be independent because he supported the colonial system there. But this was not the case and it ignores almost everything Camus said and wrote.

To put it simply, Camus believed in a ‘one-state solution’ for Algeria and France – not unlike Edward Said’s advocacy for a one-state solution for Israel and Palestine. And there was good reason for this. Algeria, from 1848, was not a colony but an integral part of France. Departments or provinces in Algeria voted their representatives into the National Assembly in France. Jewish people, who had lived in Algeria since the Roman Empire, were given full French citizenship in 1870. But Arabs and Berbers (or Amazigh) were never allowed equal political rights.

Camus’ argument was simple. It was high time that the Arabs and the Amazigh were afforded full political rights in the land of their birth – and he had been arguing this since he was a young journalist. He demanded what we demand of all democratic states: for them to be inclusive and to not discriminate on the basis of race and gender. Why should French Algeria be any different? France, Camus argued, if it was to be a proper democracy must recognise the Arabs and Amazigh as full citizens.

In 1937, Camus became a journalist at the left-wing newspaper Alger-Republicain. A newspaper that insisted that full social and political rights be granted to all those who lived in Algeria ‘regardless of race, religion, or philosophy.’ While working on, and ultimately running this paper, Camus began a series of articles on the state of the Arabs and Amazigh. His investigative journalism into the situation in the province of Kabylia during a period of famine, features the impassioned cries of what would now be called a ‘social justice warrior’.

In a series of articles published under the title “Misery in Kabylia” he wrote how the state of the people drove him to utter despair. Camus tirelessly recorded the poverty: children fighting in the streets with dogs over scraps of food, the wretched education system, old women bent double in hunger weighing only 25kg. And, he concluded, there was only one entity to blame: the French government. The Amazigh and the Arabs, he wrote, had a great deal to teach the French oppressors:

I do not think I am mistaken when I say that the destiny of this people is to work and to contemplate, and in so doing to teach lessons in wisdom to the anxious conquerors that we French have become. Let us learn, at least, to beg pardon for our feverish need of power, the natural bent of mediocre people, by taking upon ourselves the burdens and needs of a wiser people as to deliver it unto its profound grandeur.

Camus’ fight with the French authorities on this issue began long before fellow travellers like Jean-Paul Sartre took up the cause of Algerian independence. And after the Second World War, Camus was, once again, one of the first to connect what had happened to France, under German occupation, with colonialism. As he wrote in the resistance newspaper, Combat, five days after victory was declared in Europe:

The Arab people of Algeria should finally be recognised as a people. I want to point out that the Arab people also exist, by that I mean that they aren’t the wretched faceless mob in which westerners see nothing worth respecting or defending. On the contrary they are a people of impressive traditions whose virtues are eminently clear to anyone willing to approach them without prejudice. These people are not inferior except in regard to the conditions in which they must live and we must have as much to learn from them as they from us.

It should also be remembered that before Camus died, it seemed unlikely that the National Liberation Front (FLN) was going to win the war in Algeria. Far from it. The prospects of the FLN looked bleak, fighting against a French army with its superior weaponry and its horrifying tactics. Of course, it must be mentioned that Camus was also vehemently against the FLN’s terrorist tactics. As he famously stated, if these barbaric methods of war, on both sides, were a fight for justice, then, as he said, ‘I prefer my mother.’ The life of his deaf-mute mother, who worked as a domestic worker in Algiers, was more precious to him than a war that involved the killing of civilians, wholesale massacres and the torture of political prisoners.

In January 1956, Camus attempted to make an intervention into the toxic environment where FLN radicals and white French “Ultras” lived and breathed violence. Camus went to Algiers to broker a civilian truce. Walking to the hall in which he would speak, he could hear thousands of colonial Ultras at Place du Gouvernement shouting ‘Camus au poteau!’ or ‘Camus to the gallows!’. As he took to the stage with the man who would become the first Arab president of Algeria, Ferhat Abbas, the crowd of white colonials surrounded the building still calling for Camus’ head.

‘This meeting,’ he began, ‘was supposed to demonstrate that there is still a chance for dialogue.’ But as these words were uttered, stones smashed the windows of the hall. Dialogue, Camus argued for most of his life, was democracy. Without dialogue there was nothing, only a brutal war whose end would see no dramatic improvement in the prospects of the poor and marginalised. With stones, guns and the threats to have Camus killed, there could be no democracy, there could be no one-state solution for France and Algeria.