We’ve just had Freedom Day, with Heritage Day still coming up in September, and each of those days gives us cause to think about what they might actually mean.
The very names are interesting, in that they attempt to impose a singular term on what are always plural, contested concepts. What freedom means for and to me, is going to be very different to what it means to the next person, and the next. And heritage is perhaps even more problematic in that, unlike freedom, there is less of an abstract definition to cling to.
Slogans about freedom might make good T-shirts, but in the case of heritage they’re more likely to be declarations of war.
In fact, when I look up the definition of heritage on the Oxford dictionary, the usage examples it cites are spookily appropriate to South Africa. For heritage as property that is (or may be) inherited, the example is: “They had stolen his grandfather’s heritage.” The second is for heritage in the sense of “a special or individual possession; an allotted portion”. The example the dictionary gives is: “God’s love remains your heritage.”
Not around these parts, Oxford dictionary, not around these parts. I feel like you’re trolling South Africa here.
It was in this introspective mood that I sat down on Freedom Day to read a new book by Darrel Bristow-Bovey called Finding Endurance: Shackleton, My Father and a World without End.
Slogans about freedom might make good T-shirts, but in the case of heritage they’re more likely to be declarations of war
One of the book’s centring narratives is the tale of Ernest Shackleton’s abortive Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917. When Roald Amundsen won the race to the South Pole in December 1911, beating Robert Scott by 34 days, Shackleton turned his attention to another challenge — the small matter of crossing the Antarctic on foot.
On the voyage out, the Endurance became trapped in pack ice and was slowly crushed. The crew escaped by camping on the sea ice until it disintegrated, then by launching lifeboats to reach Elephant Island and, ultimately, South Georgia Island, an incredibly dangerous, 1,330km ocean voyage.
Told by Bristow-Bovey in a gentle, lyrical style, the story becomes an allegory for the writer’s own search for meaning. As I write that, I realise how trite my description sounds. This book is so much more than that. Under Bristow-Bovey’s deft hand, Shackleton’s incredible journey becomes about many other destinations, saturating the narrative with a wash of meaning that takes you on other journeys — journeys that coexist across time and commingle across space.
The story of Shackleton’s heroics in Antarctica, and the contrasts with that other great explorer Scott, would make a riveting enough book. But Bristow-Bovey adds other characters to the mix. There’s Mfanafuthi Knowledge Bengu, the captain of the SA Agulhas 2, South Africa’s icebreaking polar supply and research ship. Bengu was in charge on the voyage to the Weddell Sea in February and March 2022, when the Agulhas 2 was used as the mothership for the expedition to find the wreck of the Endurance.
It’s an incredible story in its own right. The Endurance, sunk in 1915 after being crushed by ice, was found on March 5 2022, nearly 107 years after she sank, at a depth of about 3,008m, on the floor of the Weddell Sea.
In Bristow-Bovey’s telling, the tale of the Endurance has other resonances with South Africa. The tiniest one, but one I found surprisingly touching, is that one of the dogs used on the expedition was called Smuts. And Frank Wild, one of the heroes of the expedition, died in Klerksdorp, after some years spent eking out a living in South Africa.
But the most important link, perhaps, is that of Bristow-Bovey’s father, who claimed to have sailed with Shackleton. Space precludes me looking too closely at this motif, but interwoven in the narrative is another journey of discovery, that of the writer’s relationship with his father. It’s a poignant thread, and Bristow-Bovey superbly juxtaposes the personal and the polar. But it’s where he interpolates the patriotic with the polar that interests me for the purposes of this column.
I always get a weird rush of emotion when I spot a book by a South African author on the shelves of bookstores around the world. It’s not something I’ve really interrogated. In that great bookshop, Blackwell’s in Oxford, I spotted a table specially set aside for copies of Finding Endurance, a few days after buying my own copy at Waterstones in Edinburgh.
On another shelf, Justice Malala’s The Plot to Save South Africa was displayed, cover out to the world.
Why do I find this moving? Perhaps it’s because I see these small nodes of South Africanness as indications that our histories are playing out in a vaster landscape than just our parochial little ecosystem. In South Africa — and here I speak for myself — it’s a struggle to work out what we are, what we mean. And, increasingly, where we’re going.
It’s not as simple an answer as ascribing genealogy, as Finding Endurance makes clear. It’s all those other vicissitudes of history, and indeed of the present, that allow us to struggle towards identity.
In Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, Jacques Derrida’s book about what we could term postcolonial cultural identity and the struggle to be Algerian, Jewish and French all at the same time (and that’s the worst abbreviated description of a book by Derrida you’re ever likely to read), he writes about the struggle to work out who you are in relation to your country, or at least in relation to the trappings of nation and place.
“I have but one language — yet that language is not mine ... A Judeo-Franco-Maghrebian genealogy does not clarify everything, far from it. But could I explain anything without it, ever? No, nothing. Just as with every birth, the element of chance remains irreducible, so a series of contingencies have made of me a French Jew from Algeria born in the generation before the ‘war of independence’: so many singularities, even among Jews, and even among the Jews of Algeria.”
In Peter Salmon’s biography of Derrida, he writes that “identity, Derrida noted, is never given, received or attained: only the interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures”.
In his book, Derrida reveals (and I’m quoting a Stanford University review here) “the complex interplay of psychological factors that invests the subject of identity with the desire to recover a ‘lost’ language of origin and with the ambition to master the language of the coloniser”.
Read a certain way, Finding Endurance is an attempt to master the language of Western history and apply it to our own country. And, crucially, for Bristow-Bovey to work out how he exists in relation to his South Africanness. For example, he visits the graves of his ancestors in England. “Last year I went to [Bovey Tracey] in Devon,” he writes, “where George Bovey comes from ... I don’t know what I wanted from Bovey Tracey. Some sort of clue, I suppose.”
The meanings of things change because the stories we tell ourselves about them change
— Darrel Bristow-Bovey
But it strikes me that this analysis risks leaching the joy out of this book. Fundamentally, it’s a wonderfully enjoyable read, insightful in its portrayal of Shackleton’s heroism, and touching where it deals with Bristow-Bovey’s own personal experiences. As he writes about the central symbol in the story: “Endurance meant something else to the world when she sank, and something else to my dad, and she means something new to us again. The meanings of things change because the stories we tell ourselves about them change. The Antarctic meant something once, and something else now. The ice summoned from nature’s heart by humanity’s hubris has changed its meaning too. ‘Nature’ means something different to what it meant in 1915; so does ‘humanity’.”
South Africa means something different now to what it meant when Shackleton arrived in Cape Town in 1901 as part of Scott’s Discovery expedition, and in a sense Finding Endurance is about working out what that difference is, beyond the happily obvious.
It’s not about who we are, really, but more about how to navigate “the interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification” that lets us approach an idea of who we might be.
The accomplishment of Finding Endurance is best expressed by one of its epigraphs, from Mary Shelley. “I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.”
It’s a book that will leave you suffused with hope.
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