Time of the Butcherbird

by Alex la Guma

Hlangeni's people must be moved to a Bantustan from the land near an arid town in the South African Karoo for the benefit of mining interests. No other South African writer has given such a rounded picture of all the people in a small community inexorably moving towards tragedy.

Genres: Africa, Fiction, South Africa, African Literature, Novels

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Alex la Guma was a South African novelist, leader of the South African Coloured People's Organisation (SACPO) and a defendant in the Treason Trial, whose works helped characterise the movement against the apartheid era in South Africa. La Guma's vivid style, distinctive dialogue, and realistic, sympathetic portrayal of oppressed groups have made him one of the most notable South African writers of the 20th century. La Guma was awarded the 1969 Lotus Prize for Literature.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Does pretty much everything a novella ought to do; does it well. Recommended.

[and as with nearly everything you read these days, a book for our times]

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alex La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird. Heinemann, 1987.

I fished Time of the Butcherbird out of a box, thinking that I had not read it before, but there are occasional left-handed checkmarks in the margins. I’m left-handed, and the markings are mine. Looks like I read this book at some point, but I have no memory of it. Rereading is good.

Alex La Guma was a South African writer and anti-apartheid activist, who was jailed for his writing; once he was released, he went into exile, where he continued to write works critical of the apartheid regime. Time of the Butcherbird develops three entangled narratives: One centers around Edgar, an Englishman and traveling salesman who does business with the Afrikaaner communities. A second centers on Shilling Murile, a Black South African villager, who is recently released from jail after 10 years, having been falsely convicted of attempted murder when he was still a teenager; he is now looking for revenge. The third centers around Hannes Meulen, who is from an aristocratic Afrikaaner family and is running for office; ten years ago, he was involved in the incident that killed Murile’s brother, Timi, and sent Murile to jail. I suppose that it would be simpler to say that there are English, Afrikaaner, and Black South African stories in Time of the Butcherbird

This novel is about the historic injustices and racist ideology produced by South Africa’s apartheid regime, but more important is how La Guma conveys the malignant horror of apartheid through an atmospheric narrative that is implacably marked by drought, heat, and dust. It feels like everything and everyone are overwhelmed–”covered” might be the better word–by drought, heat, and dust. As such, drought is the novel’s sign for death, whether it be environmental, political, religious, ideological, social, racial, civil, interpersonal, or individual.

The novel takes place over two days, and La Guma includes memories and dreams to contextualize and extend the pace of events. The primary settings are a small rural Afrikaaner town, a nearby Bantu village, and the surrounding desiccated landscape. There are two key events, each happening on the second day: the first is a special church service in the Afrikaaner town to pray for rain; the second is the forced removal of the Bantu villagers to another location . The three main characters and their stories begin to converge on the first day. Edgar Stopes is a traveling salesman arriving in the Afrikaaner town on his regular rounds. He doesn’t like the town, Afrikaaners, their racism, or their language. His station wagon needs repairs, though, so he will have to stay in town an extra day to wait for the local mechanic to fix the car after the special church service, which Stopes dismisses as inane, a product of Afrikaaner pride in their own racial superiority and, thus, godliness. Released from prison after ten years, Shilling Murile returns home to his village, walking from the train station through the hot, dusty countryside; he is a big man, muscled and angry; he tells others he encounters that he has returned with a purpose, but he does not say what that purpose is. Third, Hannes Meulen returns home to propose marriage to a woman from another long time landed, wealthy family, attend the church service, and campaign for the local seat in the Volksraad (that is, People’s Council or Afrikaaner People’s Council). Meulen is comfortably at the top of the socioeconomic ladder; Stopes is struggling financially somewhere in the middle; and Murile has survived somehow at the bottom.

There are a few important plot points to consider. While Hlengali, the village chief, has acceded to his people’s forced removal because he has simply surrendered to white rule, other villagers, most notably his sister, Mma Tau, refuse to leave. Moreover, Mma Tau recognizes Murile’s anger and would redirect his personal vendetta to the common good of the village, but he won’t be swayed. Ten years prior, when Murile and his brother Timi were teenagers, they worked at a Muelen family wedding, got drunk on the sly, and then foolishly released a herd of sheep from its pen. Hannes Meulen and the overseer, Jaap Opperman, found them, and–because they were busy with the wedding–tied up the two boys to deal with the next morning. It was a cold night, and Timi died of exposure. In anger and confusion, Murile sliced open Opperman’s arm with a broken bottle: he is convicted of attempted murder, while Meulen and Opperman’s negligence results in no punishment whatsoever. Murile has returned to be the agent of revenge. In the present, at lunch with Hannes, his fiancé and her father, it is revealed that the reason for the forced removal of the village is not to insure racial separation–the familiar ideological dodge–but the discovery of mineral wealth beneath the village, which Hannes and his future father-in-law would exploit exclusively between them. Even racists aren’t consistent and are motivated by other nefarious ends. There is also a tangential story about Stopes’ wife, Maisie, who, inspired by Hollywood movies and dreams of wealth, wants more from life than Stokes can offer her, so she has an affair with an old flame who provides her a few thrills, but then he, too, runs into financial difficulties. The big talk of the petit bourgeoisie doesn’t amount to much. As La Guma presents it, no one but the powerful elite live comfortably. Everyone else scrabbles for something, anything, or nothing whatsoever in South Africa.

After winding up the tension through the first day of the novel, La Guma releases it on the second day. The sermon for the special church service is long and full of self-congratulatory blather, promoting racial purity, godliness, and the continued violent oppression of all people of color. The sermon offers no humility whatsoever, but all the afrikaaners are happy with it: the land may be drying up, but their egos are assuaged. A release that releases nothing but more hot air, a ginned up ritual of bogus spirituality that produces the SOS. Nothing to see here, folks. In the mean time, the real action is elsewhere. Fulfilling his desire for retribution, Murile kills the Meulen family patriarch, veteran of the Boer War and early colonizer, and then he comes into town after the church service and kills Hannes in the town’s one shabby hotel. Hannes wonders cluelessly before he is shot why a black man has a shotgun pointed at him since it is illegal for blacks to have guns. Unfortunately, Edgar, an innocent bystander, is present and killed by Murile’s second shotgun blast, a victim of circumstance. In the village, the villagers resist resettlement, throwing rocks until the police and the transport trucks withdraw. And in a nameless city, just as the town and village are nameless, groups of Black South Africans take to the streets to protest and are attacked by the police with gas, clubs, and bullets. Prayer can neither relieve the drought nor stop the plague of violence that apartheid produces.

I like how La Guma ends the book. Murile and Madonele, the old shepherd, are back in the countryside with the sheep. The environment is still hot, dry, and drought-ridden, but now the world feels peaceful and pastoral rather than as a harbinger of death. Murile does not speak of what he has done, and instead they talk about the village and its resilience in the face of all the efforts to wipe out the community. Displaced people will not be easily displaced, and they will never stop being a people. La Guma does not offer a happy ending but a thread of hope, which, reading Time of the Butcherbird now long after the end of apartheid, attests to the strength and value of perseverance and resistance.

[Oleksandr Fediienko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Комівояжер Едгар Стоупс застрягає в провінційному містечку зі зламаною машиною, адже лагодити її нікому - всі готуються до молебню на прихід дощу. Він, нащадок англійців, з відразою ставиться до місцевих бурів-африканерів, збірним образом котрих є Ханнес Меулен - молодик, який без конкуренції проходить до Парламенту. Колись через його жорстокість помер брат Шилінга Муріле, який, відсидівши вісім років у в'язниці, хоче нарешті поквитатися з кривдником. Вождя ж його племені, який плазує перед владою, ця ж влада понизила до звання старости, і тепер сестра вже колишнього вождя закликає народ дати відсіч зазіханням білих на їхню родову землю. Багато різних людей опинилися тут водночас і їхні долі нерозривно сплелися.

[Noemi Kuban · Rating 3 out of 5]

Time of the Butcherburd sets against the backdrop of racial oppression and historical conflicts of mid-20th century South Africa, the story unfolding in a flat, arid region where the local community is denied access to essential water supplies and evicted from their land by the white Afrikaner settlers. As relentless drought persists, the villagers anxiously await rain, their last hope for survival.

Parallel to this struggle, the novel follows a native shepherd who recalls the riddle of the butcherbird, a metaphorical reflection on the injustices and violence inflicted upon his people. Glimpsing into precolonial days and the aftermath of the Boer War, Time of the Butcherbird is a reminder of the communities that were wrecked by conflict and dispossessed of their own land.

One can’t really read this now and not think of Palestine too. god.. the white man just loves to colonize, to disposses, to oppress, even to kill. He never learned, never gave the world a break…

[Ben Albertyn]

“We was a sort of Royal pronoun, it did not really include the subdued ageing ghost who shared the place.”

[Chris Hebert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great (and probably overlooked) South African novella chronicling both political instability and the fraught relationships between different groups of people in the country. It is ostensibly a revenge narrative, but la Guma does a good job letting the reader into the lives of a large array of secondary characters, each with their own motivations and stories. I'm surprised that this isn't more widely read, as it provides a good introduction to the political conflicts afflicting the country in the years after the Boer War.

[Ty · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I have been eight years in the white man’s prison.”
“Of course, man. But our people go to prison everyday. Are not our leaders in prison? We are all in prison, the whole country is a prison.”
-pg 80

[Jeremy Hopkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Studied for IB Higher at Sevenoaks

[Fatou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and powerful.

[Rik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Goede roman, interessant geschreven. Interessante manier om alle verschillende perspectieven zo mee te maken, en meer te leren over segregatie in zuid-afrika

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember this book being about a long journey through the desert, and that I read it twice in a row the month that I read it, but very little else about the book.

[Sandra Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scattered peek into different lives of those living in South Africa during the apartheid.