The Conservationist

"Well she’s a wonderful writer but I think it’s not true about white writing. If you read her books and you know the history, I think that Nadine’s books are quite closely pegged to real events in Johannesburg and South Africa. And they’re always seen from the position of a white sympathiser – there’s one in every book. Quite often she’s written black characters, but the idea that she’s an African writer, that she has penetrated the African consciousness, it’s not possible. Yes. The protagonist is a good man trying to do good things – a businessman who owns a farm he runs as a sort of hobby. But the sense is that your priorities are not necessarily the priorities of the land or the people that you find yourself in. That’s what makes it a very good book, I think. It’s a funny problem because liberal white people in Africa have always thought that Africa has a special destiny for them – that the landscape was speaking to them – that they had some sort of special control over events and over the landscape itself. Which to some extent they did by farming and ploughing and shaping it. But you find even now that the white people in South Africa, the ones who are left, who have not emigrated, believe that they are still in charge. And really what’s happened is that the Africans are making a muck up of a country that is really theirs in some strange, inexplicable way. What you get from Coetzee and Achebe is the opposite. Africans are doing it their way. Africa will always revert to its deep beliefs. No, it’s very profound. But to take a very simple case, if you’re a black doctor in Africa – you qualify at a medical school in London then come back – your aim is not to go out into the deepest forests and help people. You’re a big man now. This is a gross generalisation but it happens to be true. Your aim is not to go out and serve the people in the way the whites believe a doctor in Africa should do. The aim of the new government in South Africa is to enrich itself as fast as possible. The new billionaires in the country are all dollar not rand billionaires. It’s not just a political point, it also comes down to what the writing should be about. Are we saying that there’s a peculiarly African style of writing – in English or in the native languages – which will develop or has developed? And that is one of the many themes which the African intellectuals espouse – that they must develop a completely unique African style of writing. But the fact is that the market is in English or in French. Ben Okri told me that he didn’t want to be thought of as an African writer, and I said, “But Ben, you are an African writer and you write about Africa.” And he said, “But I want to be treated like McEwan and Boyd and people like that.” This was some time ago."