CHRIS THURMAN: An ancient text whose epic narrative reaches out to us today

I read a strident piece of poetry this week, describing the journey of a rather sorry group of souls: “To Pretoria they were led / Crest-fall’n, dust-soil’d, and haggard, to ensure / The penalty for their nefarious deed”. For a moment it seemed that these lines might pertain to a gang of international relations & co-operation officials doing penance for disrespecting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (according to Daily Maverick, the egotistical Modi refused to get off his aeroplane at Waterkloof Airforce Base until the hasty inclusion of deputy president Paul Mashatile upgraded the welcoming party).

But this was not a poem about SA now. Both the style and the subject mark it as out of date. The belated high-Victorian lines were penned by Robert Grendon in his 1902 epic Paul Kruger’s Dream, which gives Oom Paul the primary narrative voice but is nevertheless excoriating about the deluded vision of the Boer leader. Not a commentary, then, on another diplomatic imbroglio behind the scenes at the Brics summit. Rather, the passage depicted the fate of the British imperialists involved in the notorious Jameson raid.

The events surrounding the SA War (erstwhile the Anglo-Boer War) may all seem like ancient history now. We have much bigger, more urgent, postcolonial and post-apartheid fish to fry. Yet Grendon’s ambitious poetic undertaking and — more than this — his life story remain relevant to the present moment.

That is the claim of Matthew Blackman and colleagues at Blackman Rossouw publishers who, through their Strandwolf imprint, seek to bring back into the spotlight works of SA literature that have been marginalised or forgotten. Blackman admits that the forthcoming edition of Grendon’s epic, along with six other poems, is the culmination of a “17-year obsession”.

Who was Robert Grendon? Were it not for the indefatigable SA literary scholar Tim Couzens, whose research in the 1980s laid the groundwork for Blackman’s more recent pursuits, Grendon would have been lost forever. Thank goodness he was not — for, while his poetic voice may seem somewhat archaic, Grendon was an active figure in literary, educational and journalistic circles in the early years of the 20th century. He was a bold critic of racism, injustice and inequality, and he even gave expression to something like a proto black consciousness politics.

Grendon’s mother was Herero (from present-day Namibia) and his father was Irish. So he didn’t fit into what were then becoming strict categories of race and ethnicity (the thinking, as he bitterly put it, that “black can ne’er be white, nor white be black”). Grendon was also not an entirely representative subaltern; he enjoyed the limited advantages of the mission school-educated black intellectual elite.

He was, all things considered, similar to his better-known contemporary Sol Plaatje. In his introduction to the new edition of Paul Kruger’s Dream Blackman takes this point further. Quoting TD Mweli Skota, who had told Couzens that Grendon was “almost” as good a writer as Plaatje, Blackman affirms that “this does Grendon a disservice, for whereas both men were masters of discursive prose, only Grendon could lay claim to being a poet”.

There is one sense in which the comparison is not altogether flattering. Grendon, like Plaatje, had a blind spot in his analysis of the oppression and prospective liberation of black South Africans: both men were apologists for the British Empire, wrongly thinking that British rule (as opposed to Boer or Afrikaner government) would grant equal rights and status to black people. Both of them would eventually be disillusioned. Grendon spent the final decades of his life in Swaziland. Of this period, Blackman writes: “Successive British administrators tended to distrust him on account of his antiracist rhetoric and defence of Swazi sovereignty.”

Despite the complexities and what may seem to be the contradictions of his political views, Grendon’s life and work, like Plaatje’s, challenge a number of the received narratives regarding SA history. Specifically, in this case, the SA War. Blackman correctly notes that the “rediscovery” of Paul Kruger’s Dream, like the posthumous publication of Plaatje’s Mahikeng siege diary, “explodes the myth” that the war was “a white man’s affair”.