(Pre)apartheid time: Arthur Keppel-Jones’ When Smuts Goes (1947)

Time, by which we may mean narrative time, the time in which one reads, the time in which a narrative is set, or the time that defines the causal links between events, is among a text’s most signal features in determining how that text is received and consumed. One way of reading South African literature, with particular reference to those texts produced after the middle of the twentieth century, during apartheid and after, is by focusing on how temporality configures those texts’ political and cultural interests. Much of what concerns this article is the time of the reader, demonstrating how narrative comments on the reader’s historical time and offering ways of describing the past as the cause of the reader’s placement in the present moment, and suggesting how the future will be mapped beyond the time in which the reader finds herself.

My focus here is When Smuts Goes, a text of historical speculation I hesitate to call a novel, written by South African historian and academic Arthur Keppel-Jones while at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he worked for several years before eventually migrating to Canada. His political and academic stance may be described as liberal, especially as we understand the term as a designated category of white, English-speaking South Africans who stood in opposition to Afrikaner nationalism through most of the twentieth century. Though he authored several books that detail the history of South and southern Africa, When Smuts Goes is perhaps his most widely read work, and a typical instantiation of his liberal sensibilities, but atypical in its form and narrative style.

The book is a work of fiction. It is written in the style of an academic historical account but simultaneously looks forward from the present moment rather than back, anticipating what history may eventually be told from the early 1950s onwards. Its title in full is When Smuts Goes: A History of South Africa from 1952 to 2010 First Published in 2015. It was really first published in 1947, one year before the beginning of apartheid, written over a period of three weeks in 1946 (Jeeves, 1995a: 24), and aims to narrate the likely outcome of a South Africa in which then-Prime Minister Jan Smuts is no longer in power. Keppel-Jones presents us with an alternative future, one dystopic in tone as he describes a fantastic history not dissimilar to the country’s very real apartheid history. It chronicles South Africa’s timeline from 1652 to the point at which Smuts loses his position. The year 1652 marks the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck, from whom Keppel-Jones traces South Africa’s Afrikaner dominance to the then-present by way of explaining Smuts’s defeat.

All names, characters, and history referred to during and after Jan Smuts’s fall are fictitious. Smuts is succeeded by Commandant-General Jukskei (the nomenclature of which, as they bear the same name, is derived from the popular Afrikaner game akin to horseshoe pitching; he is, Keppel-Jones suggests, quintessentially Afrikaans and a key player in the author’s frolicking history). And so it begins that Jukskei (a retroactive stand-in for D. F. Malan, South Africa’s first apartheid prime minister) comes to increase the power and influence of the Nationalist Party. In real history, it was the Nationalist (or National) Party which was the political organisation infamous for institutionalizing racial segregation. This, and much more, follows in Keppel-Jones’ book. Other political organizations, especially those with communist leanings (Keppel-Jones, 1947: 11), ¹ and those that serve the interests of, and are led by, black South Africans (44–45) are disbanded and made illegal. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Professor Obadja Bult assumes the country’s highest position (63), continues with increased severity to oppress black South Africans, and violence against white South Africans ensues (43). We also witness the formation of the “Elders of the Ethiopian Zion”, an organisation intent on fighting and defending against white supremacy through black-led militarization (43). Around this time, South Africa is no longer part of the Commonwealth and the government implements the “Official Language Act”, which enforces Afrikaans as “the sole official language of the State” (57), particularly in schools (58).

Keppel-Jones’ (1947) imagined South Africa continues as he writes that, by way of sanctions, in the 1970s America influences the International Monetary Fund to decrease the price of gold, a mineral in which much of South Africa’s wealth was embedded (121). And in 1977, with Russia desiring to spread its international influence, and with Bult’s government in violation of United Nations human rights laws, America, Russia, and Great Britain begin their war with South Africa (134). On 23 August of the same year South Africa is liberated (166), and shortly thereafter the country experiences its first “colour-blind” elections (168). In 1989, after a long period of nation-building, the African Progressive Party governs the country under the leadership of Lincoln Mfundisi (182). In the years that follow, South Africa’s leaders fall from grace through morally dubious abuses of power for the purpose of attaining more power: “Corruption became under the third republic the main road to riches, and one got to this road by way of official jobbery” (186). In the 2010s, the country falls victim to a plague, exacerbated by the inferior infrastructure set in place by corrupt leaders (200).

In an interview with Arthur Keppel-Jones, first published in 1995, a year before his death, historian Alan H. Jeeves asked the author about his aims in writing this text. Keppel-Jones responded with the following, providing some context for his narrative:

I conceived it as both a prophecy and a warning, and I hoped that the warning would prevent the prophecy from coming to pass. I had watched the Nazis come to power in Germany, and although they were incomparably the greater evil, I saw some ominous parallels with [D. F.] Malan’s Nationalists. Both groups were fanatics; they were committed to a cause; and they refused to be deflected. Like the Nazis, the National Party said exactly what it was going to do. […] Furthermore, I knew that [Jan] Smuts’s electoral success in 1943 was deceptive; he owed it partly to the army vote; and it was a slightly hollow victory. After that election, the National Party was increasingly assertive, while [Smuts’s] United Party became more and more supine. That was the analysis that led me to write my warning.

[…] [The] book went through several editions and the publisher kept it in print through the early 1950s. It was published in Britain as well and was the last book published by the Left Book Club. (Jeeves, 1995b: 15–16)

Here, and throughout the interview, Keppel-Jones is clear about his liberal or leftist politics, even recalling his choice to publish When Smuts Goes through a publisher who shares his political sentiments. Yet despite his ideological proclamations, the narrative demonstrates possible shortcomings of Keppel-Jones’ liberalism, as some critics have noted.

To speak first broadly of how the book has been discussed, of the issues that have interested critics of Keppel-Jones’ text, before attempting to interrogate its temporality, we turn to Nicholas Visser who, in his essay “The Politics of Future Projection”, addresses the text as part of a much larger discussion that includes other futural South African fictions. Of When Smuts Goes, Visser points out the limitations of Keppel-Jones’ imagining of the means by which black South Africans find liberation in the narrative:

Keppel-Jones is able to provide considerable detail regarding white political parties and movements, but the long history of black resistance to white domination and organizations through which that resistance was channeled (the African National Congress was founded in 1912) disappear from his account. The eventual overthrow of apartheid is accomplished in the end not by South Africans but by international intervention organized by the United Nations. (1993: 63–64)

It seems Keppel-Jones’ imagination wanes at the point at which black South Africa takes centre stage in the final portions of the text. Michael Titlestad expresses the same reservations about the author’s limited depictions of blackness (2015: 35). Keppel-Jones’ political identity positions the author first in opposition to the evils of Afrikaner nationalism rather than prioritizing black freedom. It is a shortcoming, too, of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (2002/1948), a text that stands alongside Keppel-Jones’ in its socio-political anticipations, positioned, like When Smuts Goes, at the precipice of apartheid.

In Paton’s novel, the son of the protagonist, Stephen Kumalo, is accused of the murder of a white man, Arthur Jarvis, a champion of racial equality in South Africa. Kumalo, a pastor, travels from the east coast of South Africa to Johannesburg to aid his wayward sister and search for his son. Several philosophical and political conversations appear in the novel. Towards the end of the text, once Stephen, home in his fictional village Ndotsheni, awaits the death of his son (who is found guilty), he engages in a debate about racial injustice with a younger black man, known as the demonstrator.

Parts of the debate refer to the novel’s central act of charity, forgiveness, and grace, which defines the crux of the text’s moral optimism. Arthur Jarvis’s father, James Jarvis, assists Stephen and the community of Ndotsheni in building a dam and teaching them farming practices that would yield produce in a degraded land. Indeed, white forgives black in an era of gross white supremacy, an era where there is much for which white must ask forgiveness. Stephen’s conversant, the demonstrator, argues that “It will not be necessary to take the white man’s milk” (Paton, 2002/1948: 227), and that he works “for my country and my people. […] I could not work so for any master” (Paton, 2002/1948: 228). But, after a lengthy exchange, the text’s potentially progressive ethics are undercut by Paton’s troubling understanding of race. Stephen concedes defeat, observing that the demonstrator possesses a “love for truth”, whereupon the demonstrator admits: “I was taught that, umfundisi. It was a white man who taught me” (Paton, 2002/1948: 228). White patrons become conduits of truth and freedom; they instil in black individuals and communities a sense of their worth. Paton leaves no possibility of black people being the cause of their own emancipation. In Keppel-Jones and Paton, the political capacity of both authors’ texts is restricted by their liberal whiteness, a political designation also informed by conservative Christian sensibilities.

Black South Africans, in When Smuts Goes, look to the leadership of Lincoln Mfundisi after freedom is attained. The “Lincoln” of Keppel-Jones’ Lincoln Mfundisi calls to mind Abraham Lincoln, who deinstitutionalized slavery in America. Similarly, Arthur Jarvis, killed by Stephen Kumalo’s son, is deeply inspired by the life and actions of the former American president, where no other equivalent black liberator is mentioned. And umfundisi (spelt “Mfundisi” in Keppel-Jones’ text) is coincidentally also the form of address given to Stephen Kumalo in Paton’s novel, where umfundisi means “pastor”. Both characters, given their names, are used by Keppel-Jones and Paton to similar effect. They are both instantiations of Christian values of forgiveness and mercy, where Keppel-Jones’ Mfundisi is also a messianic figure, a benevolent liberator of the people. Black freedom is eventually attained in When Smuts Goes, yet despite this, the country eventually submits to an apocalyptic end. There is no future left, unlike that of Paton’s novel.

Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy (1989/1946) may be considered a political counter to Keppel-Jones’ and Paton’s works, where the author’s communism runs throughout the text, standing firmly against the principles of white liberalism. Mine Boy is also written just before apartheid’s beginning. Set during the time of its publication in 1946, the novel is about Xuma, who moves from the quiet country to Johannesburg, becoming a white mine manager’s assistant. Towards the novel’s end, Xuma engages in an argument with his white boss, Paddy O’Shea, affectionately called the Red One, about the angst the Red One sees in Xuma. The argument eventually centres on racial empathy, of the capacity of white to understand the hardship of black people, where Xuma contends that his white boss cannot possibly understand black suffering:

You say you understand, […] but how can you? You are a white man. You do not carry a pass. You do not know how it feels to be stopped by a policeman in the street. […] How can I be your friend when your people do this to me and my people? (Abrahams, 1989/1946: 172)

The Red One responds, instructing Xuma to “think as a man first. You must be a man first and then a black man. […] When you understand that you will be a man with freedom inside your breast” (Abrahams, 1989/1946: 173). The Red One suggests to Xuma that he transcend race by occupying a form of being whose framework functions outside the racist codes and constructs of a racist state. Abrahams’ idealistic communism is apparent here, and Xuma considers this thesis with seriousness later that day. He undresses for bed, and recognizes that, in this moment, he is “Man the individual, strong and free and happy, and without colour. Man alive” (Abrahams, 1989/1946: 174). He believes in this moment that “the country was the good country. And the world was the good world” (175). This optimism is immediately undercut by the narrator’s sobering interjection: “… If only it were so…” (175). This ambivalence, this moment in which Xuma finds existential clarity only for it to be stunted by the narrator, is dramatized in the novel’s final chapter.

When a mine collapses, and two miners are found dead as a result, Xuma insists to other mine bosses that he and the other miners will not re-enter the mine until the mine is made safe again. The Red One stands alongside Xuma. In his protest, Xuma realises that “it could be so. Man could be without colour” (Abrahams, 1989/1946: 181). Yet, thanks to the intervention of the other mine owners, aggravated by this threat to the status quo, the police are called in and begin to attack the protesting workers. Xuma runs away, briefly pursued by the police. In the end, Xuma’s existential awareness is hindered by the institutional racism that remains: he is on the run from the police, and the mine bosses do not support his cause. Projecting from that moment, Mine Boy seems agnostic about South Africa’s future, positioned somewhere between Paton’s optimism and Keppel-Jones’ apocalyptic pessimism.

Given When Smuts Goes’ catastrophic foresight, the majority of critical analysis has focused on the text’s dystopic expressions, another matter some critics have observed with reservation. Michael Green’s (1997) Novel Histories, a landmark in the study of the South African novel, takes issue with the work’s final chapters. Green argues that towards its end the text “becomes more than an intervention concerned to define the conditions upon which a future is possible; it becomes overwhelmed with its own pessimism and breaks down as narrative” (1997: 286). Green’s concerns are not unique: some reviewers writing at the time of the text’s publication expressed similar opinions. One reviewer, W. H. Clark, focused on the final chapter (entitled “The Return to Barbarism”) and wrote that this section of the text was “too lurid to carry conviction” (1948: 460). Where Clark writes towards the beginning of Keppel-Jones’ history, Green, and all critics after him, do so with the benefit of having lived through Keppel-Jones’ timeline; a caveat that may influence how one reads criticism of When Smuts Goes in this period.

Green’s stylistic concerns extend beyond the aesthetic as he argues that it also affects the text’s positions on history: “The judgement it presents is a purely negative one which, one ultimately fears despite its stated objective, carries not so much the strength of a dystopian vision as the attempt at a genuine prediction” (1997: 286). Indeed, as the title of the final chapter of the book suggests, the text takes a turn made unlikely by the poor expression of the plot: black South Africans have begun to rule, but this changes quickly as black turns violently on white before the country is consumed by a plague that eats away at the population. The pessimistic turn of the text, lacking in light or nuance, gives way to a simple prediction, compromising the strength of its telling.

The pessimism that sustains When Smuts Goes is born out of the author’s fears of a Nationalist takeover that was yet to be called apartheid. This was pessimism unseen in Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. Paton’s South African future is optimistic, achieved for the most part by liberalism of the same kind that defines Keppel-Jones’ politics. Yet the pessimism that sustains many other South African texts’ dystopic projections is a consequence from having lived in or through apartheid as the catastrophic moment (as opposed to anticipating it). A number of novels emerged at the time of apartheid and its aftermath that looked forward to an absolute temporal end as a consequence of the event. Texts often cited as examples of this futural projection are Karel Schoeman’s Na die Geliefde Land (1972) Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People (1981), J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983), and more recent post-apartheid texts, Eben Venter’s Trencherman (2006) and Mandla Langa’s The Lost Colours of the Chameleon (2008). These works are almost exclusively dystopic in subject and tone, suggesting that the time to which these texts look is one of no time at all, an end time; and (with the exception of Langa’s book) they are exclusively written by white authors, suggesting that “these jeremiads depicting the collapse of the South African state are inevitably reactionary” (Titlestad, 2015: 31). Speaking of the temporal form of dystopic, or apocalyptic, fiction more generally, Michael Titlestad shows that “progress and apocalypticism both conceive of time as linear and repress psychosocial dynamics of the recovery, re-articulation and re-organization of the past in the present in order to (re)imagine a future” (2015: 39). Titlestad configures a poetics of apocalyptic time, specifically as it is expressed in dystopic fiction that recalls or alludes to apartheid, arguing that such formulations of time are described by a truncation of the future.

My interest in the text lies within its temporal forms broadly, and its understanding of time as it is defined by its depiction of history specifically. Given its dystopia, the text may be read as one that posits an end to time. Yet given its mock-academic historical account, given its conceit of looking back from a fake futural vantage point though written from the then-present, Keppel-Jones’ ironic history may benefit from further interrogation of its historical form so that we may begin to appreciate its implications for the reader’s history and the reader’s time.

Though it remains contentious to understand a work of fiction in this way, there is value in discussing and evaluating authorial intention. However, using such information must be done with caution, a sense of knowing that the author’s word is never the first, last, or only say on the text. Jeeves’ interview with Keppel-Jones was cited towards the beginning of this essay. The portion of the interview referred to earlier is one in which Keppel-Jones speaks about his intention behind writing When Smuts Goes. The very first sentence of his response is intriguing: “I conceived [When Smuts Goes] as both a prophecy and a warning, and I hoped that the warning would prevent the prophecy from coming to pass” (Jeeves, 1995b: 15). We may take “prophecy” as a sign of an unrealized though fully described and determined future, a historical account of a time to be. The only commonality “warning” shares with “prophecy” is that they are both forward-looking. How they differ is that “warning” does not possess the futural certainty articulated by “prophecy”; with the use of “warning”, there is an awareness of multiple futures at the precipice of the present, where the speaker describes one of those futures as more undesirable or more morally bankrupt when compared to other considered projections. Yet Keppel-Jones seems aware of the contradictions within his statement, as the second part of the sentence shows: “and I hoped that the warning would prevent the prophecy from coming to pass”. The tension between these two words may be useful in informing a reading of the text, and may illuminate the contradictions in the book. Both words must be considered to begin to grasp the temporal aspects of the text. Regarding the text as only one thing, particularly as prophecy, is to ignore its fullness.

In 1986, just over the halfway mark of the period of When Smuts Goes’ imagined timeline, historian John Stone published an essay in which he sought to evaluate the truths behind Keppel-Jones’ phony history, to “reassess the accuracy of [When Smuts Goes’] basic predictions” (1986: 412). Stone begins his evaluation by admiring Keppel-Jones’ efforts, but also makes clear that the author’s “analysis of South African society was based on certain assumptions some of which have inevitably proved to be wrong” (1986: 414). In broadly defined subheadings, Stone lists some of the categories in which Keppel-Jones’ book would eventually prove inaccurate: “The speed and manner of decolonisation in British Africa”; “The significance of gold and strategic minerals to both the world’s and South Africa’s economy”; “The role of internal and external wings of African liberation movements”; and so forth (1986: 414; emphasis in original). It is an interesting and perhaps the first and most obvious way to assess a work such as this, but it is ultimately a display of misguided appreciation.

In its broad sweep, real history shows that all of the above occurs, more or less, as “predicted”. The National Party successfully extended its white supremacist policies into South Africa’s media, education, and economy. With the assistance of international pressures, Afrikaner nationalism was successfully overturned by a magnanimous black struggle stalwart who assumed leadership in the country’s highest office towards the end of the twentieth century. And relatively soon after democratic freedom was reached, South Africans became increasingly embittered by their liberators’ nepotism and greed after having entrusted them with positions of state authority.

Certainly, it is remarkable that there is any overlap between Keppel-Jones’ fiction and the reader’s lived history. Yet if we are to assume the position of a pedantic reader, we would see that, fact for fact, specific details do not align with the history in which the reader resides, particularly history as we view it now. Readers in post-apartheid South Africa will know that the National Party does not take over in 1952, but in 1948; more than 100,000 English-speaking white South Africans do not emigrate (or trek) out of the country during the 1950s, but remain; and 1970s America was defined not by its conflict with South Africa, but Vietnam, with Ronald Reagan’s “constructive engagement” defining America’s economic relationship with 1980s apartheid South Africa.

It would certainly be incredible if Keppel-Jones offered a narrative perfectly aligned with what was to be, but it would be unfair to expect such a feat of this or any author, making such readings of these kinds of text interesting but limited. This is especially true given how relatively far into South Africa’s future Keppel-Jones projects, and it would also be to miss the point. To appreciate his project, in ways other than what Stone (1986) offers, means to read When Smuts Goes with a light touch, to read it for its more sweeping significance. Our appreciation of the text’s futural interests must be done from afar.

By linking the coincidences between real history and Keppel-Jones’ imagined future, exercised with a degree of generosity, we recognize the author’s skill at illuminating the pattern in the warp and weft of time. Reading the text as a set of predictions, or as prophecy, to use Keppel-Jones’ reluctant label, would be to understand historical trajectory as singular in its inevitability, where there can be no deviation from a prescribed timeline. It is a kind of reading that is not only limited, but also indicative of what may be described as a pathological understanding of time — specifically, one instigated by the restrictions of apartheid.

Derek Hook, writing on apartheid temporality, provides a lens through which we may read Keppel-Jones’ temporal play. Before Hook, though, there is Mark Sanders, who, after apartheid, writes towards the points at which apartheid and psychoanalysis meet, contributing to a conversation Hook has sustained (publishing a work in 2013 whose 2014 reprint I reference), with particular interest in developing a poetics of apartheid time. Investigating the aftermath of national trauma, Sanders (2007), like Hook, relies on the work of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich who speak of the inability of a post-war Germany to mourn the downfall of the Third Reich. In their work, The Inability to Mourn, the Mitscherlichs use Freudian psychoanalysis to observe the psychological profile of Nazi Germans in the decades following the Second World War as subjects who have lost much, but who, because of their status as perpetrators of the war, cannot mourn in the same way as do victor and victim.

The Mitscherlichs describe mourning as “the psychic process by which the individual copes with a loss” (1975: xxv), a definition derived from Freud’s use of the term. Due to the nature of the aftermath of the Second World War, the Mitscherlichs argue that Nazis’ and Nazi sympathizers’

inability to mourn the loss of the Führer is the result of an intensive defense against guilt, shame, and anxiety, a defense which was achieved by the withdrawal of previously powerful libidinal cathexes. The Nazi past was de-realized, i.e., emptied of reality. (1975: 23)

The argument here is that feelings of guilt and shame arose because Hitler, now fallen, “was an object on which Germans depended, to which they transferred responsibility” (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, 1975: 24). It was this object that underwent “devaluation by the victors” (1975: 24). Guarding the subject from this devalued figure, guarding against feelings of guilt and shame, would necessarily erase the Nazi past, to “de-realize” them from history. The past, then, “becomes” unresolved since mourning cannot properly take place. The spectre remains unacknowledged, unnamed, and continues to haunt, and the future lies beyond reach so long as the past is denied.

In Ambiguities of Witnessing, Sanders focuses on the memory of apartheid: how apartheid may be defined as an act of deliberate forgetting, and how, after apartheid, South Africans seek to remember and mourn its losses in ways similar to how Germans did and did not after the Second World War. Sanders’ material of scrutiny are the hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, held from 1996 to 2001), the country’s globally visible attempt at allowing the perpetrators of apartheid to seek amnesty while, most centrally, hearing the stories and testimonies of victims.

In constructing an understanding of a time after apartheid, Derek Hook relies upon similar psychoanalytic principles, particularly the work of Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, at times also citing the work of Sanders and other authors (Pumla Gqola, Antjie Krog, Sarah Nuttall, and Carli Coetzee) who have written on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as South Africa’s most signal attempt to address the atrocities of apartheid. Yet Hook does not work from the TRC archive, but from the Apartheid Archive Project, the purpose of which, as described by Hook, is to “document the experiences of ‘ordinary’ South Africans, whose accounts may not otherwise have been recorded” (2014: 16). With this, Hook conceives of how apartheid time (and time after apartheid) may be configured, with attention paid to those narratives largely ignored both during and after apartheid. The trauma of these narratives, more numerous than those heard by the TRC, had been strongly tethered to the state, but it is also the state (albeit a differently configured one) that has denied them the attention offered by the TRC. Because of this, these lost stories of trauma have not been granted the same opportunities of mourning, and, significantly, have therefore assumed different temporal identities and descriptions. In Hook’s words, some of the defining features of time after apartheid are the “staccato tempo of abrupt truncations and precipitate beginnings” (2104: 6). Time, both during and after apartheid, is cut short.

As in post-war Germany, Hook shows that in post-apartheid South Africa the losses of an oppressive regime “remain unspeakable for […] a nation whose founding definition relies precisely on the repudiation of all that apartheid signified. Apartheid is not an object over which grief can be authorised” (2014: 167). There is no space in which contemporary South Africans can find comfort in the memory of their failed past. There can be no grieving over this selectively beneficial establishment with which past South Africans identified because present South Africa cannot celebrate it in its current context. Hook explains that such a paradigm “neglects the complications of the multiple symbolic […] attachments […] of past and present, conscious and unconscious identifications” (2014: 168). In such a mindset, closed to a profusion of past and present identities, it is impossible to identify simultaneously with both past and present to any degree, and time assumes a singularity and unidirectionality quite dissimilar to the forms of temporal plurality evident in Keppel-Jones’ When Smuts Goes.

Hook’s terminology is deliberate, illuminating further how we may better grasp apartheid temporality. Apartheid and “(post)apartheid”, as he terms it, are not seen as separate because the effects of apartheid have not yet been resolved in the present. Hook disrupts the term in a manner similar to how “postcolonial” has been disrupted by authors such as Russell West-Pavlov, who argues that colonialism continued its oppression of first peoples, and may even have been exacerbated, after the time that is conventionally thought of as the end of colonialism (2013: 160). The parentheses Hook places on the term emphasize the point: it would be unethical and perhaps even inaccurate to imply that apartheid has ended. By contrast, an ethical temporality would be defined by its imagining of temporal plurality: “An ethics of temporality entails a continuous juxtaposition, a folding of times, whereby the past might be radicalised and the future re-envisaged, altered on its trajectory from a continuous recapitulation of what it was” (Hook, 2014: 204–5).

Both the time of apartheid and (post)apartheid, for Hook, may be defined by a pathology of time, especially one in which the future is corrupted: “If the past cannot resonate differently in the present, and if the present cannot differently access or remake the past, then the goal of psychical change […] would not be possible” (2014: 204). More specifically, part of what characterizes this time is that it becomes stagnated and stunts the future, where the future of both black and white South Africans is stunted, albeit by different means. Under the threat of apartheid, black South Africans are gripped by “a profound disbelief in their capacity to shape their own future” (Mbembe, 2013: n.p.). And the future of white South Africans is stunted by an “unconscious belief that [punishment] will, at some indeterminate point, most certainly arrive” (Hook, 2015: 65). Within literary studies, Andrew van der Vlies (2017) uses the term “stasis” to describe this state, particularly as it is reflected in contemporary, post-millennial South African texts. Van der Vlies describes a generation of young writers who speak with disappointment against the unfulfilled promises of freedom, where there appears to be no progress beyond a static present.

Given that When Smuts Goes was written a year before apartheid’s institutional inception, utilizing Hook’s (post)apartheid theory to frame a reading of Keppel-Jones’ work may seem an anachronistic mismatch. Hook speaks of and writes at a time during and after apartheid; Keppel-Jones imagines a time during and after, but publishes his work at a time that precedes them. Extending Hook’s logic, and indeed Hook’s temporal scope in the process, seems a necessary act in this endeavour if we are to use his ideas at all. In other words: how may we figure an understanding of (pre)apartheid time? What would the premises and consequences be of such a term? How may we extend Hook’s temporal ethics, but do so looking back?

Hook’s temporal ethics are defined by an understanding of time as plural, that several possible futures inform the present moment. Perhaps a similar kind of temporal ethics may define the past as well: not only is it that anything could happen in the future, but anything could have happened to lead us to a different present, too. Or: that apartheid happened at all ought not to be understood that the event was inevitable (where inevitability is only ever, and can ever be, determined after the fact). Also, other causes may have led us to the same present moment, which suggests a continuing openness to being surprised by the past. To fall into the traps of believing that apartheid was inevitable or that only one set of causes may explain apartheid’s happening is perhaps to submit to the kind of time Hook describes as apartheid time. It is to submit to the belief that time is singular, unbending, monolithic. The argument against such a conceptualization of time may be identified in the parentheses of the term (pre)apartheid, styled in the way Hook does. The parentheses in Hook’s “(post)apartheid” signifies that apartheid lingers in the present moment, and also by extension to Hook’s argument against the narrow or singular understanding of temporality suggested by apartheid time.

“(Pre)apartheid” would then suggest that the precursors of the event may be found before the spectacular moment of crisis, but not in a way that argues for apartheid’s inevitability. Instead, it indicates that apartheid did not simply arise out of nothing: to speak only of apartheid and (post)apartheid is to assume that there is no (pre)apartheid; it is to assume that apartheid lacked any causes, that it emerged fully formed and without explanation. (Pre)apartheid is a way of thinking of the precursors of apartheid as one among several histories that could have resulted in several presents and futures.

Of course, the label “(pre)apartheid” could only have been given at or after the fact. If it were given before the inception of apartheid, the label would be meaningless; it would refer to an event that is yet to be. Given before would also suggest impossible predictive abilities. So, to think of the causes of apartheid requires an acknowledgement of its temporal expanse, of its reach for the time both before and beyond its orthodox beginning and end. Such considerations seem pertinent in foregrounding the significance of what (pre)apartheid could mean.

Reading When Smuts Goes by this framework requires some sensitivity not only to the tricky temporality of the telling of this “history” (where both past and future exist only as a consequence of the author’s creation), but sensitivity to Keppel-Jones’ work at a moment of national transition, sensitivity to the present in which he finds himself creatively. Monica Popescu writes on South African literatures of political revolution, particularly on literatures that attempt to bring South Africa out of apartheid, transitioning the country into freedom. While Keppel-Jones’ text is written at the other end of apartheid, at the point of its beginning, Popescu’s writing is useful insofar as she locates her argument more broadly in literatures of transition. These moments of transition are described by what Popescu calls “affective temporal structures”: ways of “perceiving the present moment and establishing relations (whether of continuity or rupture) between the present, on the one hand, and the past and the future, on the other” (2019: 34). The present must be understood as a fulcrum between past and future. And, if we are to continue using Hook’s ideas, then the moment of transition at which Keppel-Jones writes must necessarily be thought of as both continuity and rupture, to slightly adapt Popescu’s formulation. It is continuous since apartheid cannot be thought to have a time before 1948 and a time after 1994. It signifies a rupture since, only a year after the publication of Keppel-Jones’ text, South Africa’s legislative landscape had altered dramatically from what it had ever been before.

Speaking of When Smuts Goes as a novel of transition must be done cautiously. Tsitsi Jaji, writing in the same anthology as Popescu, adds to our understanding of literatures of transition an ethical dimension. Jaji explains that South African works of transition may be thought of as “permanent, ongoing, and excessive, spilling over temporal boundaries and territorial frontiers, as the ever-approached and never-reached limit in the calculus of liberation” (2019: 275). Given the limited ethics of Keppel-Jones’ text, in which descriptions of black (self-)liberation are altogether wanting, it is not a text that seeks liberation in the sense Jaji proposes. Jaji’s authors of transition, which include Peter Abrahams and his Mine Boy (Jaji, 2019: 269), are those who write against exclusion, those who do not “obscure their shared humanity in confronting the toll of hydra-headed racial and capitalist violence” (2019: 276). For these reasons, Keppel-Jones’ text is not ethically sound, but the temporality employed in its telling may demonstrate why it is perhaps more ethically ambiguous rather than wholly inadmissible. To begin interrogating the text along these lines, to understand the consequences of the text’s unusual time, we must understand the dual authorial voices that carry the narrative. Keppel-Jones speaks as both author and mock-historian at various points in the text, each operating on a different temporal plane.

In his “Introduction” to When Smuts Goes, Keppel-Jones (1947) appears as himself in the time of the book’s writing, before adopting the voice of the mock-historian narrator of the fantastic history. In this portion of the text, as himself, Keppel-Jones speaks of the disillusionment and unchecked optimism of white South Africans at the time, 1947, arguing that such optimism blinds then-South Africans to any possibility of catastrophe. The Introduction details Keppel-Jones’ argument for multiple possible futural outcomes. He writes: “If there were no grounds for such hope [in deterring an undesirable future] it would have been a waste of time to write this book. But let the reader think well before saying ‘it can’t happen here’” (n.p.). Keppel-Jones exercises great care in his consideration of the potential pitfalls that may become apparent when navigating the complexities of time. The structure of his book shows awareness of multiple futures, not only the ones he imagines in his narrative, but also all the possible futures extending out from the reader’s time. Part of the intention of the text, if read as a warning, is to instil in the reader a sense of the plurality of her own time, a recognition that every present moment potentiates multiplicity. The phrase “‘it can’t happen here’” suggests the moment before one realises that history does not submit to an assumed prescribed trajectory. Keppel-Jones’ attitude to history, at least as far as this extract goes, is to recognize its susceptibility to misuse as a text whose purpose is to project likely futures that fit comfortably into one’s preconceived beliefs about the flow of time. In other words, the meaning of Keppel-Jones’ introductory phrase, “‘it can’t happen here’”, is suggestive of an awareness that his book narrates merely one of the likely sets of consequences to which South Africa’s history seems to point in both its and the reader’s time.

At its closing, the mock-historian narrator of When Smuts Goes offers a meditation on what may be gleaned from the narrative:

There are many people still living in the Republic whose memory takes them back to the period with which this history opened. How many of them, one wonders, are able to see the events of those sixty years as a logical series, every change the necessary consequence of those that had preceded it? How many, as they let their minds wander over the past, can remember the crossroads and signposts where their national ox-wagon took the wrong road though another road was available? (202)

It would be a mistake to assume that Keppel-Jones offers these words as an indictment of history’s ineluctability, demonstrated in the narrator’s assertion that, in this history, “every change [is] the necessary consequence of those that had preceded it”. It is precisely the author’s description of history as a “crossroads” that demonstrates his willingness to concede that his narrative is one among many possibilities. His narrative acts as a warning against the dangers of one of the worst possible scenarios, one which, as it happened, was not too far off the mark of history as we have come to know it.

Certainly, there are few but significant moments in the text’s opening chapter (“The Nationalists take over”) in which the past (both of the text and the reader) is narrated in ways that may suggest the author’s truncated historical imaginary. In the narrative itself, the mock-historian narrator begins by turning to 1652 by way of explaining how the Nationalists eventually take over in 1952 — that moment of transition, to recall Popescu. Leading up to the Party’s victory are the Tercentenary celebrations, marking 300 years since Jan van Riebeeck landed in the Cape. The text tethers its fantastic future to a history that begins in the middle of the seventeenth century; this indicates, perhaps, that the author’s detailed chronology of South Africa’s white settler history is extrapolated from inevitable outcomes. Of these celebrations, and of the political climate leading up to the Nationalists’ victory, the narrator informs us that “The historic emotions of 1938 were therefore due to be repeated in a slightly different medium” (3). This is a telling phrase, where repetition signals the crippling of history conceived of in multiple ways (as we learn from Hook), the consequence of which is a present to which there can only be a limited or no future. Suggesting something similar, but expressing it more directly, the narrator observes:

the forces that were to play freely after 1952 were not, of course, new. They had been developing throughout the earlier history of South Africa, like flood waters piling up against a dam. In 1952 the dam burst. The historian gratefully receives this dramatic event as a landmark to guide him in his course. (1)

In the narrator’s “flood waters” metaphor, the future flows directly from the present with no suggestion of unexpected deviation. It is one history that leads to one future. But considering these arguments as representative of the entire text would be to dismiss most if not all of When Smuts Goes. Of equal interest is the extract’s final sentence, in which the mock-historian, writing in the third person, alerts the reader to his own textual creation, his authority over the text and the process and inspiration of its writing. Given that Keppel-Jones is a historian, that the narrator of the historical narrative is himself also a historian begs attention. It is a sign of Keppel-Jones the historian functioning also as historiographer. We witness his reflections on the flow of history, its turns, patterns, and purpose. It seems the text’s primary objective is to use history as a corrective of future transgressions. Such a claim may be developed by holding side by side Keppel-Jones and his historian alter ego.

There seems little difference between the two at first. Politically, both are motivated by a white liberal sensibility. Keppel-Jones explains this in the interview discussed towards the beginning of this essay; the mock-historian in the telling of his well-intentioned white-centric history. Both, too, seem to express similar ideas about the shape of history; both speak against history’s inevitability, demonstrating openness to surprise and deviation in history’s course.

What is more challenging is identifying their differences. We know more of Keppel-Jones than we do of his mock-historian, where knowing the mock-historian would allow us insight into the significance of Keppel-Jones’ metafictive turn, his reflection on history-writing. Yet who, really, is the narrator of the text? Has he been commissioned to write this story? What is his academic training and motivation? From where outside the Republic does he write, and why, exactly, did he choose to leave? The narrator does not provide much to address these gaps.

The stark differences between the two, of course, are that one is real and one imaginary. And both write from different temporal positions. The narrator of the fake history reflects upon an imagined past from the position of an imagined future. Keppel-Jones meditates on the future, writing at a time before the narrated history, arguing, in the process, that history and its telling may function as a corrective of future evils. Specifically, he writes against a particular kind of repetition. Yet what is to be repeated is not that which is in the past, but that which begins first in fiction. Keppel-Jones the historiographer, then, plays with history’s form to political and ethical ends. In its anticipation, it is a history that is an ante-history, truth that is ante-truth. It is a fiction that writes against itself, warns against itself, if, indeed, we are to take Keppel-Jones’ text as a warning to begin with.

Keppel-Jones describes his work as “both a prophecy and warning” (Jeeves, 1995b: 15–16), where prophecy suggests a singular temporality, and warning multiple. Its prophetic moments are demonstrated within the narrative proper, in which Keppel-Jones’ mock-historian narrates South Africa’s history as inevitable, but does so, importantly, with the benefit of hindsight (if we are to entertain the conceit). Yet this prophecy is foregrounded as a warning by the author himself. Keppel-Jones posits this as one narrative among many, where his interest is in a single possible future. And if it is written as a warning to then-South Africans, then it is a warning against what we have come to understand as apartheid time. It anticipates apartheid, and is therefore a (pre)apartheid text in both senses of the term: it is, simply, written before apartheid; but it does not submit to the temporal restrictions imposed by such a system, challenging it in the process.

Using Hook’s temporal conceptualizations will only take us so far in reading When Smuts Goes. Hook’s temporal ethics do well in informing us about Keppel-Jones’ ethical formulations of his text. To think of multiple strands of time is to subvert the kinds of moral restrictions Keppel-Jones anticipates in apartheid. But, through a consequence of the time of its writing, Keppel-Jones’ work cannot be explained by the trauma of apartheid.

Hook’s theory is developed to read the effects of apartheid on a nation’s perception of time, observing how such limited time is the result of an inability to access the full range of experiences and attitudes to history “after” apartheid. As such, reading Keppel-Jones’ text through Hook demonstrates perhaps that the psychoanalytical aspects of Hook’s ideas are of modest application. Hook relies deeply on the past and the pathological forms it may assume to construct an argument on the future, showing that the past will infiltrate the present and future as long as it remains unresolved. Turning to psychoanalysis, he speaks of an inability to mourn the loss of apartheid as a consequence of a shamed past, thus producing a myopic future. It is the past, then, from which all else rises, the past and its misshapenness that forms the base of his theory of time to be.

In When Smuts Goes, we look to the future. To return to Keppel-Jones’ word, his “warning” to then-South Africans is a term that is ultimately forward-looking, where the present is one of tense anticipation. There is anxiety at the centre of his text, where the future holds its promise as a threat. And while feelings of threat and anxiety are more broadly psychological than they are psychoanalytical, they do well nevertheless in beginning to understand the mental impact of Keppel-Jones’ temporal forms, where the author also provides us with enough else by way of historical time to begin to appreciate his ideas on the flow of events through the construction of his fake history. Through its enfolding times, the text’s continued resonance depends more on its playful temporality than it does on its limited ethics or, especially, its prophecy.