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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
Under Southern Eyes: The Soviet Union Seen by South African Travelers
| Panel |
7. Africans In Russia
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| Paper ID | 464 |
| Author(s) |
Popescu, Monica
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | If post-colonial literature and theory has been influenced by intellectuals traveling “into the West,” to use Amitav Ghosh’s phrase, a smaller number of African intellectuals chose Eastern Bloc countries as their destination. During the apartheid regime, many intellectuals affiliated with the African National Congress or the South African Communist Party traveled to Eastern Europe to find political refuge, to study, or to receive military training. A good number spent the remainder of their lives there, as revealed by ANC statistics. Up to this point, their writings have received very little attention, being usually dismissed as political propaganda without much literary value. Yet these writings pose questions about the role of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the South African imaginary.
This form of travel has taken place within the constitutive political binaries imposed by the Cold War. As a result, intellectuals affiliated with the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party regarded the Eastern Bloc as a source of inspiration for writing about the social and political struggle in their own country. However, one needs to interrogate the biases of their accounts. The travel narratives of Walter Sisulu, Archibald Sibeko, and Ruth First are a far cry from the disappointment experienced by Western “fellow travelers” (like Andre Gide). What reasons, aside from political expediency, determined these open-eyed critics of South African oppression to overlook similar censorship structures, imperial tendencies, gender inequality, material shortages and even racism, which they must have witnessed in the USSR during the dying days of the Stalinist regime?
To answer these questions I will focus on Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey as it reflects and deflects the ideological and cultural background in communist countries while outlining the writer’s hopes and strategies for overturning the apartheid regime. I will contrast his narrative with accounts of life in the Eastern Bloc given by La Guma’s sons, whose reports shed a different light on racism, nationalism, and the possibility of integration.
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