Human side of heroes

In so many ways, South Africa is bound to its grand narrative of liberation.

As the end of apartheid became an imaginable reality, several critics - Albie Sachs and Njabulo Ndebele among them - argued for the need for less ideological literature. Writers, they argued, would have to complicate their commitment to a distinctly political project and turn their attention to the textures of our humanity.

This was not a call to abandon history, but to step back from programmatic writing, which placed activism ahead of subjectivity.

Driven by political imperatives, protest and resistance writing of the 1970s and 1980s avoided complicating the liberation struggle. Villains and heroes had to be clearly drawn.

Mandla Langa's new novel, The Texture of Shadows, represents, in this regard, a version of political maturity.

It tells the story of a group of Umkhonto weSizwe insurgents who cross from Botswana into South Africa in 1989, just as the nation is on the cusp of transformation. The patrol carries with it a trunk, the contents of which remain a mystery for much of the novel. It represents, though, the burden of history as it becomes the cause of violent contestation among competing factions within the People's Army, each trying to control the representation of the past and secure purchase in the future.

At the centre of the network of insurgents is Chaplain Nerissa Rodrigues. Her role and influence in the narrative is a compelling counterpoint to the received wisdom about MK insurgents: she is human, resilient, prudentially heroic, but also torn between competing factions vying for control. Liberation, her life attests, is no simple matter; it is a delicate balance of the personal and political.

What version of the resistance movement emerges in the novel? There is no shortage of bravery in various forms, but most members of MK are damaged by years of subterfuge, the violence of the apartheid security forces and by the torsions of exile.

These are not the soldiers of propaganda posters. They are individuals struggling to reconcile their commitment to liberation with the ways in which the world - in all its political pragmatism and violence - has affected their lives and is unfolding in unexplained ways. Most are selflessly dedicated, but they are also used as pawns by those above them, on whose judgment they cannot depend.

The novel, which to my knowledge offers the first fictional, insider-view of MK, leaves us with a textured sense of what it meant to be a freedom fighter. It also dispels the myth of a seamless, titanic force in precisely arrayed ranks. But the disheveled, loose-group of insurgents we engage, organised along increasingly obscure lines, with a shifting sense of its mission, is, arguably, no less laudable.

We see what a history of harm does to individuals, who are nonetheless willing and able to fight for justice.

Despite the disclosure of ANC violence against its members in Quatro and elsewhere, public discourse has baulked at the fallibility of MK members.

We continue to want heroes in the simplest sense, and seem perpetually alarmed to discover that former freedom fighters deserted, were suspected of double-dealing, were interrogated by their own officers or were guilty of committing violent acts against their subordinates.

The Texture of Shadows reveals that the damage of apartheid extended to the very nature of the resistance movement. Covert resistance organisations are fashioned in a climate of paranoia and fear.

They are denied the luxury of consistent administration and clear chains of command, and inevitably replicate aspects of the system they oppose.

It is courageous to make this concession.

• Titlestad is an associate professor of English at Wits