Our writers lay bare the truth about SA, one book at a time

Courage was one of author Alan Paton's most important qualities

A good many years ago, I was sitting in a smoky bar in Warsaw with Lewis Nkosi. I'd been spending time in Moscow - and Poland was holiday time, away from the Soviet Union. We were drinking vodka, I think - it was too dark to see. Iron curtain countries kept the lights down low. Life was one, long, load-shedding twilight.

Lewis and I got to talking about home, as it happened when South African exiles and expatriates met in faraway watering holes. Lewis had a little rant about Cry, the Beloved Country. Alan Paton, he said, was too damn liberal by far and his novel was "sentimental ... baloney".

Lewis didn't use the word "baloney", but you get my meaning.

And he had a point. But then writers don't have to be liked, although they do need to be read. And Cry, the Beloved Country was read. Published in the late 1940s, 18million copies had been sold by the time Paton died in 1988. And tens of thousands of copies are still sold worldwide every year. For many readers, especially those overseas, Cry, the Beloved Country quite simply is South Africa.

I knew what Lewis felt about the book, so I just went on staring into my vodka. But he would not let it go: "You know the guy, Chris. What do you think of the old toppie [man]?"

Lewis could switch from Oxford English to straight South African in a flash. The old toppie? Suddenly, I was so homesick I practically wept into my vodka. Instead, I told Lewis that Paton was one of the most considerable writers we had produced.

Lewis was never one to let a vague answer pass.

"Considerably what?"

"Considerably brave," I said.

I had in mind not only Paton the writer, but Paton the witness to his times. And this is really rather appropriate here, tonight, just days after the 50th anniversary of the Rivonia Trial. I had in mind Paton's offer to go into the witness box and publicly defend Nelson Mandela and those with him in the dock.

Think of what this means. The numbers of white South Africans willing to stand up and speak for Mandela were vanishingly small. Paton they saw as mad, bad or both. Hell's bells, he had founded the Liberal Party, and called for a free vote for every South African and rejected the crazy idea that one race trumped all others. He even believed that beating, locking up or shooting your citizens did not in any way improve their behaviour.

So when Paton volunteered to testify as a character witness in the Rivonia Trial, many of his white compatriots saw him as even madder, badder and more dangerous to know.

Once in the witness box, Paton was assailed by the prosecutor, Percy Yutar, a man in love with apartheid and to the right of Genghis Khan, who tore into Paton as if he was also on trial alongside Mandela. Imagine it: in the white corner, Percy, the Prosecuting Piranha, and in the pink corner, Alan Paton, the loopy, liberal predikant [minister], who wanted - was he mad? - every single South African to be given the vote ... immediately.

Tonight, we celebrate the Alan Paton whose name has adorned these Sunday Times book awards for nonfiction for 25 years.

For 25 years, the prize has been given to contemporary writers who, the judges believe, demonstrate "compassion, elegance of writing and the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it which are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power".

Well, despite my friendly disagreement with Lewis Nkosi all those years ago, that pretty much sums up what I admired about Paton. Of course, admiration does not have to mean wholesale agreement.

Paton could be obstreperous, cantankerous, feisty and infuriating; he was like a vicar on steroids.

I first met him in the early '70s when I was living in Durban. I'd started a literary magazine called Bolt and we had the astonishing cheek to want to publish work by the best African writers and artists. And we did: Leopold Senghor, Adam Small, Wally Serote, Pascal Gwala, Douglas Livingstone and William Kentridge among them. And it was as the editor that I went and asked Paton if he would give us a new story for my magazine.

"Ah, Hope," he said. "I've been reading your poem about the railwayman called Kobus le Grange Marais, who lost his legs in a shunting accident, who sits in a bar, drinking cheap wine and making racialist remarks. And it's terrible."

Then he quoted a few lines I'd put in the mouth of old Kobus, the angry old shunter:

"Oh, it was dop and dam and a willing girl when we were young and green/ But Jewish money and the easy life are the ruin of the Boereseun/ He disappears into the ladies bars and is never seen again/ And sits with moffies and piepiejollers and primps his nice long hair/ You'd take him for an Englishman, said Kobus le Grange Marais."

Then Paton tucked his chin into his chest and went into something very like a boxer's crouch. "What on earth is a 'piepiejoller'? And what is a 'moffie'?"

When I told him, he simply said: "Not good to mock the disabled. Always remember, young man, this country is not an unmitigated comedy."

I could have said to him that this country is not an unmitigated tragedy either, but I was young - and Paton was a grand old man. And he gave me a story for my magazine. It's called The Hero of Currie Road, a fine story which exposes the lunacies of playing the race card and the posturing, muscular stupidity of those who do so - those who vow to die for this country when all too often what they really mean is that they are ready to kill for it.

Paton was a good liberal who hated extremes. For my part, I'm fascinated when extremes converge. Because whether someone favours brown shirts and rides a horse somewhat uncertainly and another prefers a red beret and rides a swanky German limo, I have trouble telling the difference.

You see, what our writers do is to show us to ourselves. Maybe not fully or fairly. But in their work - novels, stories, poems - we glimpse likenesses of ourselves. Catch sight of that curious creature, still very much a work in progress, whom we call a South African. We see this happening in Paton, in Bosman, in the works of the writers who are honoured here tonight.

Writers may be thought to be a peaceful lot - do not believe it. Writers, one eminent publisher remarked, are OK - so long as you're fond of children. Writers can be rancorous and competitive, and I often think of the American Mary McCarthy's savage put-down of Lillian Hellman: "Every single word she writes is a lie - and that includes 'and' and 'but'."

Writers can manage without other writers, but they need readers. In the old days, we always counted on a team of censors who read every word we wrote. The censors were often a larger readership than some young poets ever found again.

As things turned out, regarding Kobus Le Grange Marais, a bit later the old toppie found an unexpected ally in the former SABC , which disliked the Kobus le Grange Marais poem as much as Paton did and banned it for being deeply unfair about the idiocies of those with too much power.

But my poem didn't go away. David Kramer set it to music and sang it in concert. Then, in 1994, when democracy arrived in the new South Africa, Kramer recorded the song. Bad mistake. The brand-new SABC banned it, all over again, for being ... unfair and cruel about the idiocies of those with too much power.

What we have now is soft censorship. The careful control of broadcasting licences, the infusion of public money into papers that bolster the party line. There was a joke in the old Soviet Union about the newspapers Pravda, which means truth, and Izvestia, which means news. "There is no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia," went the old joke.

When, in the apartheid epoch, the SABC was described as a government glove puppet, the description was exact. The trouble today is that the puppet needs no glove; it knows what to say.

Whether we like it or not, writing in South Africa, as it often is in countries struggling to come to terms with dark and dodgy pasts, is political, even when it doesn't set out to be, precisely because it holds the mirror steady in front of us and says, simply: "Look." We may not like what we see, we may attack it, condemn it, spurn it. We are, after all, a very fractured society - turbulent, disobedient, unruly. Good. Our stories often will not agree. But our stories must be told and published and read if ever we are to see who we are.

Hope, based in France, is an award-winning South African writer whose accolades include the Whitbread prize for fiction and the CNA prize. He was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize for fiction. This is an edited extract from his keynote address at the Sunday Times Literary Awards last night