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A Separate Development
Young Harry Moto has problems with fallen arches, crinkly hair that won't flatten down, a plump chest and, for a white man, unusually dark skin. Harry's appearance provokes mercilessly sarcastic taunting from his schoolmates but, living in South Africa, it is not surprising that it is his skin color which eventually brings about his downfall. . .
- GenresFiction
208 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2010
29 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Hope
62 books12 followersHe studied at universities of Witwatersrand and Natal. He is an author of poems and novels, also published autobiography, biography of Robert Mugabe, dictator of Zimbabwe, and travel book Moscow! Moscow!, which he got prestige PEN Award. Debut novel A Separate Development (1981), satire on apartheid system, forbidden in South Africa, got the David Higham Prize for Fiction.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
fic-guided
August 20, 2020History, as they say, is written by victors. The ANC and Nelson Mandela will be commemorated by history as the heroic forces that ended what was euphemistically called by its (unvictorious) inventors ‘apartheid’ – ‘separate development’ – but which was, in practice, ‘keep the black man down – for ever’. Gnawing away, like bien-pensant rats, at the foundations of the apartheid state, novelists played their part in bringing the obnoxious system down, either by protest fiction (as with Alan Paton’s CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY), chronicles of Kafkaesque alienation (as in Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K) or satire. Christopher Hope (better known in South Africa for his poetry than his fiction) was firmly in the satirist camp. On publication, A Separate Development was banned by the authorities (‘temporarily suppressed’ – they loved euphemism), a badge of distinction at that time, in that place. The main contention of the novel – its offence against the regime – was that it rendered apartheid a laughing matter. Absurd. It aligns Hope with that other satirist of South Africa, Tom Sharpe, but Hope, I think, is the subtler comedian of the two.
The novel takes the form of a comic monologue, delivered by Henry Moto. Moto, as we first meet him, is a ‘coloured’ who ‘passes’ for white. Later on he is a white who masquerades as a ‘coloured’ (a word with a unique resonance in the South African lexicon). For Henry, there is no separate development, only a pigmental confusion. He is ‘an identity in search of a group’ or – a supreme term of abuse – a ‘white kaffir’, a hybrid condition which in South Africa has none of Norman Mailer’s ‘White Negro’ chic miscegeny. Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, created a world more absurd than Ionesco’s or Beckett’s.
The main part of the narrative (a forced prison confession, we gradually realise) covers a chaotic period between Henry’s running away from school, his going to ground in Koelietown, and his eventual capture by the police. His offence, apart from an indeterminate pigmentation, is the supposed rape of a white woman who was in fact so eager for his embrace that Henry could be considered the more qualified defendant.
The novel’s structure is the simplest known to literary history: that of the picaresque string of adventures in which the rascally hero pinballs through society – now up, now down, always in motion. At the same time, A Separate Development has its sharp topicalities. It is set in the late fifties to the early sixties, and the first third of the book, dealing with Henry’s white schooldays, has the feel of a transposed American Graffiti. Apart from the macabre final scene in prison, when reality kicks in, Hope sticks to broad, knockabout comedy. Some episodes work better than others. Funniest is when Harry is recruited as driver-cum-model for ‘Epstein the Traveller’, peddling his range of Gloria Sunshine Skin Care Products. As one enthusiastic apothecary tells the ambiguously tinted hero:
It’s your sort of epidermis the Africans want. The trick is to make them believe it comes out of a can. I don’t suppose you spare a little piece? As a sort of sample, you know, the way they do with curtains. I’d have something to show my customers what to aim for. Just a small flap, Harry, from the wrist, say, or a couple of inches from behind the thigh. You’d never miss it. I’d have it mounted on cardboard like those colour-matching charts in paint shops.
To his parents, teachers, employers, and even to the sinisterly paternal police interrogators, Harry is a ‘naughty boy’. And the novel itself is pervaded with a sense of mischief. Naughtiness can play its part in bringing about a better world.
The novel takes the form of a comic monologue, delivered by Henry Moto. Moto, as we first meet him, is a ‘coloured’ who ‘passes’ for white. Later on he is a white who masquerades as a ‘coloured’ (a word with a unique resonance in the South African lexicon). For Henry, there is no separate development, only a pigmental confusion. He is ‘an identity in search of a group’ or – a supreme term of abuse – a ‘white kaffir’, a hybrid condition which in South Africa has none of Norman Mailer’s ‘White Negro’ chic miscegeny. Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, created a world more absurd than Ionesco’s or Beckett’s.
The main part of the narrative (a forced prison confession, we gradually realise) covers a chaotic period between Henry’s running away from school, his going to ground in Koelietown, and his eventual capture by the police. His offence, apart from an indeterminate pigmentation, is the supposed rape of a white woman who was in fact so eager for his embrace that Henry could be considered the more qualified defendant.
The novel’s structure is the simplest known to literary history: that of the picaresque string of adventures in which the rascally hero pinballs through society – now up, now down, always in motion. At the same time, A Separate Development has its sharp topicalities. It is set in the late fifties to the early sixties, and the first third of the book, dealing with Henry’s white schooldays, has the feel of a transposed American Graffiti. Apart from the macabre final scene in prison, when reality kicks in, Hope sticks to broad, knockabout comedy. Some episodes work better than others. Funniest is when Harry is recruited as driver-cum-model for ‘Epstein the Traveller’, peddling his range of Gloria Sunshine Skin Care Products. As one enthusiastic apothecary tells the ambiguously tinted hero:
It’s your sort of epidermis the Africans want. The trick is to make them believe it comes out of a can. I don’t suppose you spare a little piece? As a sort of sample, you know, the way they do with curtains. I’d have something to show my customers what to aim for. Just a small flap, Harry, from the wrist, say, or a couple of inches from behind the thigh. You’d never miss it. I’d have it mounted on cardboard like those colour-matching charts in paint shops.
To his parents, teachers, employers, and even to the sinisterly paternal police interrogators, Harry is a ‘naughty boy’. And the novel itself is pervaded with a sense of mischief. Naughtiness can play its part in bringing about a better world.
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July 14, 2024
Deeply satirical picaresque novel about the absurdity of South Africa’s racial separation laws. Very funny in parts, and with vivid, colourful writing, it is not quite angry enough to hit the mark but an entertaining read nonetheless.
January 16, 2009
Youth of indeterminate 'colour' in South Africa in about 1980. Clear picture of bits of underworlds of a non-political, anti-apartheid and non-apartheid society (non-political in the sense that they were all just struggling to earn some money and stay alive, not joining movements).
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews